


Katabasis

by midrashic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Demon Dean Winchester, Foe Yay, M/M, Mark of Cain Cure, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, Pre-Slash, Season/Series 10, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-21 04:01:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 46,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14907938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: Fortunately for the newly-condemned Dean Winchester, there's more than one way to resurrect an angel. Love, hell, and other myths.





	1. Last Rites

**Author's Note:**

> Pre-slash Dean x Castiel. Goes AU before “Black”: Sam’s search for Dean goes a little awry. Our story picks up two months after Dean wakes up after being stabbed. Mechanics of Hell and the Mark of Cain not compliant with canon. Rated M for graphic descriptions of torture.
> 
> Warnings: canon-compliant racism (mentions of hentai, non-Western religions as lesser “pagan gods”), canon-compliant sexism (use of the word “bitch,” dismissive references to Dean’s female past partners), animal cruelty, choking in an action scene, domestic violence (not between real Cas and real Dean), depictions of torture and PTSD (Hell flashbacks), temporary major character death.

– ✞ – ✞ – ✞ –

Crowley came with a flush of dark smoke and the bitter scent of burnt rue still hanging in the air.

He took in his surroundings with the same expression Dean had once seen him wear when he’d demanded a whiskey, and a minion, freshly graduated from whatever demon minion academy regularly churned out bush leaguers to complicate what had once been Dean’s life, had poured out two fingers of Johnny Walker Red instead. “A little over-the-top, isn’t it?” He gestured at the unlit roads stretching away from them, the devil’s trap Dean had sprayed on with safety paint in the dirt. “A summoning _and_ a crossroads? And what is that—rue? Dean, darling, all you have to do is call.”

“If you had anything to do with this,” Dean said pleasantly, “I’m going to rip out your tongue and replace it with one of your fingers. Maybe an eyeball.”

Crowley’s smirk faltered.

“Bet you say that to all the girls,” he tried.

Dean kept smiling from where he was stretched out, well out of Crowley’s reach, against the only tree for about a mile and a half, already bare and brittle in mid-September. He kicked at the ceramic jug he’d planted in the dirt by his feet. “Yeah, sure. Keep talking, I got a pitcher of holy oil and nothing else to do all night.”

“All right, all right,” Crowley said sharply. “Fine. Much as I would like it to be untrue, Castiel is dead and I had nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want. Wasn’t me. I’d have made it look like an accident. And-” Crowley was abruptly sly again- “I’m hurt that you’d be so suspicious.”

Dean arched an eyebrow and let his eyes flicker black.

Crowley shrugged. “Touché. Well, I was going to keep him alive. I even found a—grace booster shot, if you will, organically grown and cruelty-free. Well, mostly cruelty-free. Well, I ripped it from an angel’s throat and then stabbed her with her own blade. The point is, Cas was still useful, so I was going to keep him in use.”

Being a demon, Dean thought most of the time, was more or less the same as being human. Sex was still good, beer was still good, and killing was still good, and that was all Dean really wanted out of life, anyway. But being a demon was also _more._

Now that he was no longer fighting his way through a sucking sludge of emotion every time he tried to have a thought, he was sharper, clearer. Not caring about what anyone thought of him freed him up to see them, what they wanted and what they were disgusted by in themselves, unclouded by how _he_ wanted them to feel about him. Not caring about most things, in fact, made things that _were_ important stick out all the more.

That included Crowley’s ever-growing tangle of plans and plots, which, he figured, was only wise, seeing as how the last one had landed him here. “Aw, come on, Crowley. These days, angels are a dime a dozen. What’d you need Cas for?”

“Does it matter? Poor dove’s dead now.”

Dean inclined his head to where, by his other foot, he’d planted the First Blade in the ground like the world’s oldest and ugliest trowel.

Crowley scowled. “If you really must know, I needed him for you.”

That was—annoying, but not actually surprising. “Me?”

“I don’t pretend to understand it—maybe your blasted luck rubbed off on him from exposure, maybe it was just that lovely, shiny mind of his—but even tapped out and practically mortal, Castiel would’ve been more of a check on you than any couple dozen angels I could get in bulk from Upstairs.”

Dean was startled into laughter even as Crowley huffily adjusted his suit cuffs. “You think that Cas could’ve _controlled_ me?”

“No, but I think that I could’ve sent a couple of platoons of demons and half a battalion of angels for luck and you’d have cut through them all with—” Crowley’s eyes settled meaningfully on the the Blade’s hilt where it was jauntily angled in the dirt.

“And you think I wouldn’t have done the same with Cas?”

“You hadn’t so far,” Crowley said. Dean smiled again, a _hadn’t yet_ sort of smile, and looked at where the Blade was pressed against the side of his shoe. “It doesn’t matter now, of course. I was going to wait till he was on his last legs, play up the drama a little. Never miss a scene, you know me.”

“What, you forgot to set your alarm?”

"And I’ve already killed the demon responsible, don’t you fret. But by the time I got there, our angel of perpetual hope had already been…drained.”

Dean sat up. He hadn’t really _expected_ any surprises while setting up this meeting—the surprise, he’d figured, was what Dean was going to do after he’d milked Crowley of all the information he had. But this was— _unusual._ “ _Drained?”_ he said sharply. _“_ The hell do you mean, _drained_? He isn’t dead?”

“Oh, no,” Crowley said, “he’s dead. Dead as a door-knocker, dead as Marley, you know how it goes, you’ve read the book, or, more probably, seen the TV movie. No, he’s dead. He’s just in Hell.”

And that—now, _that_ had Dean’s attention.

– ✞ –

When Dean had heard that a Winchester had been going around torturing demons, he’d just put his boots up on the pub table and sat back to wait for the show.

When he’d thought about how this would go down, which hadn’t been very often, he’d figured that it would end with him killing Sam. As a concept, he hadn’t particularly cared whether Sam lived or not, but he’d assumed that Sam wouldn’t just politely listen to the lecture Dean had for him on living and letting live and go back to the bunker to toil the rest of his days away. Dean hadn’t _wanted_ , exactly, to kill Sam—he’d just liked the idea of having his very own Wile E. Coyote dogging his steps till the end of television, eternally trying to wrangle him into a devil’s trap or under a bucket of holy water, even less.

It’d had nothing to do with Sam himself, which was a new and refreshing thought. He hadn’t realized how every decision he’d made had been so weighted down by Sam—concern for Sam, love for Sam, anger at Sam, resentment at Sam—until they hadn’t been anymore.

He’d even been able to appreciate Sam’s decisions in a way he hadn’t been when he was human. The old hurts, the ones he’d tucked away between his ribs to pull out and mull over when he was at his lowest and couldn’t remember why he deserved it, had seemed more respectable in this light: Sam leaving for Stanford, Sam chasing after _another_ damn dog when Dean was in danger, Sam wanting to die—the kid had just set his sights on what he wanted and didn’t care if anyone else needed him to stick around. It had been selfish, sure, but an admirable kind of selfishness.

That was all Dean had wanted: to have a turn living for himself.

Sam probably wouldn’t see the resemblance, though. He’d always been funny about that.

Dean had crossed into Wyoming a week before and had been sacking up in a town even more rinky-dink than usual just off I-80. According to his phone Burns, Wyoming, had a population of 303, three bars, and a post office. The Sam and Dean Show was going to be the most excitement that town had seen in a generation.

To pass the time while he’d waited, he’d slept his way through the entire wait staff of the first two bars and had been working on the third when Sam had found him. The wood floors had been lovingly cleaned and scrubbed—T-Joe’s Bar and Saloon was definitely least unsanitary of Burns’s rich bar and pub scene—but the boards had been old, and had creaked unpromisingly under Sam’s massive tread.

Dean hadn’t bothered turning away from the TV perched behind the bar, blaring the afternoon rerun of _All the President’s Children_. Sam had kept ticking along for almost two months before he’d gotten desperate enough to pull out the nasty tricks; he could wait until the commercial break.

“Gimme a minute,” Dean had told him. “Stephen’s just about to tell Barb he could hear her when he was in a coma.”

From behind him, he’d been able to hear Sam’s breathing. Sam had stepped closer, the floor groaning at every movement, until he’d been only a bar table away from where Dean had been leaning against the counter. Close enough to splash some holy water; too far for a knife to reach. Dean had approved, in the distant way he approved of neatly executed blowjob tricks or the workmanship of a well-constructed car.

“It’s really you,” Sam had said into the dusty quiet of the bar. His voice had been different; it had rasped and bumped along, like he’d been swallowing gravel.

“Hey now, what’d I say? I don’t interrupt you when you’re clean-cutting a demon, you give me my quality soap time.”

 _“Barbara?_ ” Stephen had wept messily. _“Barb, please say something._ ”

“I can’t,” Sam had said.

“ _I can’t,”_ Barbara had said, agony dripping from every pore of her fine-boned face.

Dean had thought about flipping the Blade up from where he’d tucked it against the small of his back and slashing open Sam’s throat, maybe give him a haircut while he was at it, and had decided that would be an overreaction. He’d turned to take Sam in for the first time since he’d died, mouth still not quite unbent from a dangerous smile. Sam had looked haggard, like he’d pushed himself too far getting here. His right arm had been pinned up in a cheap pharmacy sling; his free hand had been clenched at his side.

 _“Stevie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,_ ” Barbara had intoned from the TV.

“Sure,” Dean had said indulgently. “We’ll do it your way. Two months and you don’t think to check for a note? I left it in the first place I thought you’d look.”

“That’s not why I came.”

“No? Well, the gin’s not bad here, but if you want the good stuff, you might wanna ask a guy with living taste buds.” Dean had let his eyes flick black, watched Sam stare at him in colors outside the usually-visible spectrum.

“Once,” Sam had said, “you probably could’ve made me flinch with that.”

Dean had turned around fully then, interested in spite of himself. “Okay, I’ll bite. So you didn’t come to drag me out of my own corpse. Why’d you come here?”

 _“Stephen,”_ Barb had said, “ _you’re still in the coma._ ”

“Cas is dead,” Sam had said, just as onscreen, Barb had burst into tears.

– ✞ –

After that, they’d gone to the bunker. Of course they’d gone to the bunker; it had been the bunker or an empty grave in Pontiac, Illinois.

Even in separate cars, it had been an awkward five hours. Sam had looked at the car like it had just stolen hope he didn’t even think he had anymore from him, looked at Dean like he hadn’t been sure sure whether Dean (generously!) offering to let him drive or the thought of driving back to the bunker with Dean in the driver’s seat instead of handcuffed in the trunk would be worse, looked at the road with a kind of hollow misery that Dean could feel wafting out at him from two car-lengths away.

Dean, for his part, had spent the ride with _In Through the Out Door_ in the tape deck—sadly, not loud enough to drown out Sam’s feelings beaming out at him from the next car—turning over the surprise that had settled over him like a fog. It had shuddered through him like molasses moving through his veins as Sam had explained: the stolen grace, Cas’s powers fading until he’d been as weak as a human, then weaker. Except for the mindless, euphoric tide that swept over him when he fed the Mark, it had been the strongest thing Dean had felt in two months. 

Cas, being Cas, _would_ go and die just to give Dean a feeling.

It had been possible, of course, that Cas hadn’t been dead at all. The idea of Cas’s deadness still sat like a rock in Dean’s head, refusing to let itself be digested or understood. Sam and Cas could’ve brewed up this drama to get Dean to drive himself right onto their home turf. A good hunter couldn’t discount the possibility. And whatever else he’d been or was now, Dean had always been a _very_ good hunter.

But…but Dean had startled _himself_ when he’d leaned back and challenged Sam to come up with the body; this underfed, jumpy version of his kid brother with bruises dyed under his eyes hadn’t even been able to come up with an answer for the first few minutes. Besides, it had always been easy to read Sam, even before the Mark made the world hard and bright and clear.

When they’d pulled up in front of the bunker, it had been dark and getting darker for a solid hour, but the stars had only just been beginning to come out.

The bunker had been the same. A few of the lamps in the library had burnt out and the tables had been a mess of demonology tomes, credit card reports, security stills, and police reports, but it had _smelled_ the same—undusted books and a sweet coppery tinge they’d assumed had been coming from the pipes. Sam had gone first, to break the devil’s traps set over and under every entrance in the bunker. And then Dean had been looking at Cas’s corpse.

He’d cracked up laughing.

For one thing, Cas had actually looked better than Sam—pale under his naturally tan skin, but at least not wearing Sam’s wretched grief-face. For another, Sam had put him in Dean’s _bed_.

“Am I supposed to—ha, what—wake him up with a kiss?” Dean had cackled.

“I wasn’t going to leave him in his crappy rented room in Joliet where he was only staying because he was looking for _you_ , you—you soulless son of a bitch.”

“Wouldn’t have worked anyway—I’m good, but I ain’t that good.” Dean had stepped to the side of the bed. Cas had been in just the dress shirt and slacks, consistent until the end. Delicately, he’d placed two fingers against the long line of Cas’s neck and felt for a pulse.

Nothing.

“Well, doc, it doesn’t look good.”

Sam had only closed his eyes and turned away. Which had been about what Dean had expected. “You sure he’s kicked it?” he’d said lightly. “Maybe angels hibernate.”

“I—Hannah. I called Hannah. She…confirmed it.”

“Oh, yeah, _there’s_ an opinion I trust. Chick’s full of good ideas. Hey, maybe if Cas’d killed me when she asked, we’d—nah, we’d still be in this mess.”

“You’re a monster,” Sam had said, like the thought was only just occurring to him now.

“We’re all monsters, Sammy. At least I’m not a goddamn idiot. Cas looks pretty freaking good for an anything that died a week ago.”

“That was _Hannah._ I had her—freeze the, the body. In case I—in case.”

“Waxworks on demand. Classy.”

He’d turned back to Cas, fascinated by Cas’s stillness. When he’d first met Cas, the way Cas only moved with intent, only blinked if he’d wanted to and remembered to blink, had hypnotized him. There’d been something calculated about that stillness, almost predatory, like Cas’s natural state of being was the destruction of everything in a mile radius, like to stand near Dean and _not_ take him out with the sheer force of his presence had been what required restraint.

Over time, Cas had started to move like a human. He’d learned to fidget nervously and to use his body like he owned it instead of controlling it. And still, sometimes, before everything had most recently gone to shit, Dean would fall asleep during a case and wake hours later with Cas having watched crappy motel TV on mute all night, hunched in exactly the same position on the couch as he’d been when Dean had closed his eyes.

This had been different. This stillness had been emptiness—pure absence.

Dean had looked up just in time to catch Sam staring at him again, something resigned and very sad in his gaze. “You know,” Sam had said abruptly, “I heard—that you’d changed. I heard that you were a demon. But I didn’t really believe it.”

Dean had smirked. “There ain’t no substitute for the real thing, Sammy, you know that.”

“Even when I saw it for myself—even after what Crowley told me—”

“Of friggin’ course, _Crowley_ —”

“—all I could think about, the only thing I cared about, was fixing it. Finding you and getting you strapped down in the basement so I could cure you.” Sam had raked his good hand through his hair, and the light on his face had made him look even gaunter, even sadder. “Whatever it took.”

Dean had spread his arms in invitation, but Sam had been barely paying attention to him by that point, too caught up in whatever torment was playing out behind his eyes and spilling like water from his lips. “And the only thing that stopped me was Cas. Sticking around, even after his grace failed and I got hurt, even though I told him to go home, go anywhere else. Keeping me from crossing a line, from—from using innocent people as bait. And dying. All that time, he was dying. And he never _said_ —” Sam had wrenched his head away, as if he could have shaken the truth out of his own brain.

“Hey, I’d’ve left a note for him, too, if I thought he’d be back after his big kumbaya moment with the other Big Birds.”

Sam’s hand had found its way to his hair again, where he’d clutched hard. “And I…and now…”

Pleasantly: “And now?”

Sam had swallowed. “Now,” he’d said evenly, “the last real friend either of us had left on this plane of existence is dead, and I just—I just can’t anymore.”

Dean had surveyed Sam, slumped into himself like a building collapsing, and had seen the truth. How Sam had accepted the guilt of this, too, like he’d owned it, like it had been his to hoard. He had been able to see, then, with a clarity he hadn’t had in life, how Sam piled guilts on himself like they were sustenance, water in the desert, and how finally the weight of it had hollowed him out and left him drained and hopeless.

“I had to tell you,” Sam had said stiffly. “Even though I know you’re—not you right now. You still had to know.”

Dean had looked back at Cas then, gaze intent on the dark sweep of Cas’s eyelashes and the way his lips parted, like he was about to take a breath. Any moment.

Strange; even as a demon, some part of Dean had just assumed that Cas would live forever.

Instead, Cas had burned, slowly, from the inside out, devoured and corroded by the same thing that had once made up his wings. The thought itched at him, like a cut he was holding back the healing factor on, like the Mark singing in him for blood.

 _Well_ , Dean had thought, _we can’t have that._

“Make yourself useful,” Dean had said. “Get me the summoning kit.”

– ✞ –

In life, there had been a lot of things about Crowley that had annoyed Dean: the expensive cologne that was almost always overpowered by the pungent fume of sulfur that hung over demons like a haze, the corruption of the soul so strong that it became a tangible smell; the easy affability that Crowley affected to make him seem less like a threat than he was; the way it had been Crowley— _Crowley_ —who had grubbed out an escape from an apocalypse and two or three near-misses instead of anyone who remotely deserved it. In death, Crowley had gotten a lot more tolerable, or at least tolerable enough that sticking around while Crowley’s dogs threw anyone who would be looking off his scent made sense, at least for a while. The cologne thing still sucked, though.

By far, though, Crowley’s worst attribute was the tone of pure condescension he took whenever he tried to explain anything to an underling—and to Crowley, _everyone_ was an underling. It came out everywhere, at the negotiating table and the foosball table, and it was why Dean had eventually split.

Crowley’s protection had been nice, but not worth being talked to like one of his pet hellhounds. Not with the First Blade whispering merrily, thirstily, into his blood all the ways in which he could sever Crowley’s carotid before he could even look surprised.

“Back in the war,” Crowley said in his most condescending voice, “the big one, mind you, not these little penny-ante skirmishes you get now, Lucifer wasn’t the only angel that got the boot. Very popular guy—you know angels, they go all gaga over any passing pretty thing.” Crowley shot him a look that was a little too pointed to be casual, and Dean got the mild sense that that had been meant as a dig at him, though he couldn’t work out how. “Quite a few followed him down and—well, you know how it goes. Lucifer lost, got slapped with 8000 consecutive life sentences, and your gene pool became the hottest topic on the unearthly planes.”

“I don’t,” Dean said lightly, “see what any of this has to do with Cas.”

“I’m getting there, you arse. Now—did you ever wonder what happened to the rest of Lucifer’s followers?”

“No, I can safely say I have never wondered that even once.”

“’Course you didn’t. Why would you? How do angels solve any of their problems? If it can’t be stabbed, burn it; if it can’t be burnt, stab it. No imagination, that lot.

“But these were the old days, and God was still making house calls. And God—now _he_ had imagination.”

The wind whistled, cold and plaintive out over the crossroads and the Devil’s trap and the long plains stretching out toward the curve of the earth. Crowley shivered and then looked bewildered at himself, as though he had accidentally frightened himself with his own ghost story. “Maybe he took pity on the lost, or maybe he had just had enough of killing his children…second-rate creations though they were. Or maybe he thought death was too good a punishment for their crimes. Either way, when he built Lucifer’s cage, he made a few more…renovations to the structure.”

Dean leaned forward, hungry. “There’s another cage?”

“There’s another _plane_. A hell inside of Hell, where Lucifer’s lieutenants do whatever it is condemned angels do for the rest of time.”

Dean relaxed against the tree trunk behind him. The sharp twinge of the knobby bark of the trunk pressing into his spine grounded him. “Angel Hell, huh? You’d think I’d’ve heard about something that big before.”

Crowley laughed, a sharp scraping sound, like a blade on ice. “Oh, you’ve heard of it. It’s got a good few names, actually—Gehenna, Tartarus, Irkalla. Where demons fear to sodding tread.”

“And no one’s ever tried to crack it open? Seems like that would’ve really spiced up the Apocalypse.”

“Oh, people have tried. _It can’t be bloody done_ ,” Crowley bit out, glaring at the white poplar branches above Dean’s head as though they had personally insulted the cut of his suit. “Lucifer’s cage was always meant to be unlocked sooner or later, End of Days and all that, but this particular pen’s been sealed off with professional-grade Seal-Tite. There’s no way in or out, even from other parts of Hell.”

“So,” Dean said, “how did Cas get in?”

Crowley paused and turned to look at Dean, his expression hard to read. Dean waited, generous in his patience—this was interesting, more than he’d expected it to be, and he didn’t have anywhere else to be all night. Or forever. The moon hung low over the horizon, a sliver of blue casting bitter, cold light on Crowley’s pale hands and the bone-bleached crossguard of the Blade.

Crowley continued, more slowly, “No one knows where angels go when they flutter off into the great beyond. They don’t get reaped; as far as we know, they just…flare out. Poof, gone.” He snapped his fingers. “There are, however, a few exceptions.

“No one really understands the mechanism behind it—it’s only happened a few times before, and, for obvious reasons, the angels are frustratingly close-lipped about it. Most of them probably don’t know much more about it themselves. But me…I think the big man liked how the whole carrot-and-stick act went with the mud-monkeys, and decided the upstairs brains needed a stick of their own. A bogeyman to scare them into keeping their place so that nothing like Lucifer could ever happen again. Eat your veggies and do as you’re told, or the fallen angels of Gehenna will steal you away.”

Dean couldn’t help himself—he started laughing, again. God, even dead, Cas dragged him into the most ridiculous things.

“You know that’s fucking insane, right?” he told Crowley.

“As on earth, so in heaven. Matthew 6:10. Consider picking up a copy sometime; I hear it’s quite the relatable read.” Crowley looked bored, but a little pale around the edges, like he was trying to pull off coolly uninterested but not quite managing it. “Personally, I think the American Standard is a little brusque, but demons can’t be choosers.”

“So how’s it work, then? Bad angels go to Angel Hell?”

“The _worst_ angels,” Crowley lectured, “go to Angel Hell. An archangel has enough power to swallow the sun, but you don’t even know the half of what depravity those sweet little cherubs are capable of. The angels whose crimes set off God’s ineffable algorithm? Semihazah told a _human_ the true name of God. Abner almost overthrew Heaven. Jeqon _invented_ nephilim. You can fifth column for Satan and die a more honorable death.”

Dean shook his head, half-smiling, still not quite believing. “And Cas? He’s the only angel I ever met who gave a damn about anything other than the self-righteous stick up every angel’s ass.”

“Castiel,” Crowley said, “has single-handedly killed more angels than any other being in history.”

“God _resurrected_ him.”

“Well…I guess God’s done with that.”

Dean closed his eyes and let his head fall back. He reached above himself and stretched up to take hold of a poplar branch, gripping it so tightly that the hard grooves of its bark bit into his skin, drew blood. The world sharpened again; warmth pumped through him as his cuts closed up. “How did you know?”

“Well, angels don’t have souls, do they? There’s nothing after death for the Pit to latch onto. So it takes them a moment before death. Steals them out of time. It leaves a trace, an absence. Like I said, he was _drained_.”

Dean heard rustling as Crowley slipped his hands into his pockets, like any old stargazer out for a night stroll on a deserted tract of the old Midwest. “Also, the lack of ash splashed all over the walls and bedding was a great big honking sign that something had gone terribly wrong in the dying process. Bleeding grace or not, Castiel still died an angel. There should’ve been signs. The birds should’ve been crying.”

An image flashed across Dean’s mind—ravens, screaming some kind of mourning song, their flight feathers ragged and torn. Forced to earth. And then Cas’s wings huge and dark against the barn wall, back then something so immense and terrible that Dean tasted lightning whenever he looked at him.

Dean opened his eyes.

The filter of demon-sight receded when he blinked, the world no longer as sharp, just varying shades of midnight gray. Dean smiled genially. “So you do know where he is,” Dean said.

Crowley faltered; Dean was off-script. With mild panic, he elaborated, “Well, he’s dead, he’s not exactly anywhere—”

The First Blade cut through the air like a missile, like a hunting bird, and hit the road hard enough to scratch a jagged line through the devil’s trap. Dean stood and dusted himself off before he walked over to where Crowley was standing frozen, still in the trap, to retrieve the blade.

Crowley drew back and narrowed his eyes. “Not that I’m not grateful, but—I was expecting that blade to land somewhere a little higher. And fleshier.”

Dean touched a hand to his chest in mock-hurt. “Aw, now why would I do that? You were _very_ cooperative. Trust me, I’m as surprised about that as you. Besides, you’re still useful…so I’m gonna _keep you in use_.” Dean slung his arm over Crowley’s shoulders. The stiffness there amused him; wasn’t this what Crowley had been angling for all those weeks before he’d annoyed him into leaving? “Hell, you even knew where Cas was. We’re already half there.”

Crowley closed his eyes. “Half…where?”

“Why do you think I called you, moron? A friendly _chat?_ ” Dean tucked the Blade into his waistband, where it hummed cheerfully against his bare skin. “We’re gonna rescue an angel. From Angel Hell! Ha!”

– ✞ –

It only took a day and a half to get Crowley to admit, after much protestation, that there was at least one old, _old_ wives’ tale, practically demonic apocrypha, to suggest that _perhaps_ God’s answer to supermax was not as untouchable as might be believed.

The story went that a fallen angel had taken a pagan goddess for a lover—whether this was a better or worse kind of heresy than macking on a human, which could not only get an angel excommunicated from the Holy Heavenly Church but also got the angel, the human, and everyone the human was related to within two degrees of separation spit-roasted, was up for debate—and when he’d bit it and been sucked down into the Pit for his troubles like so much bathwater, she’d gone after him. Of course, Crowley emphasized, no one could substantiate that rumor if they tried. And they’d tried.

Dean shrugged. “Give it a week, see what you can do,” he advised.

“You want me to do in a week what a legion of assorted demons, scholars, et cetera, what have you, haven’t managed in five and a half millennia?” Crowley asked, voice heavy with disbelief.

“Yes,” Dean smiled.

Four days later, Crowley appeared at the foot of Dean’s crappy (king-size, which was nice) motel bed in the crappy motel room he’d rented while he waited for Crowley to come through. He took in the peeling baroque wallpaper and the pyramid of empty beer bottles Dean was using for target practice with the Blade with a disdainful look, but didn’t comment. “I found it.”

Dean flicked the Blade neatly into the topmost bottle of the pyramid. The glass cracked around it but didn’t shatter, so when Dean stepped over to draw the Blade out of the wall, he pulled that ancient jut of jawbone from where it had bored two ragged, warped holes into the brown glass of a bottle of Schultz and pinned it flush to the old, cracked plaster.

“Well—lead on, MacLeod,” Dean smiled. He tucked the Blade back into his waistband, where it thrummed darkly, like it knew that soon there would be something meatier, _bloodier_ , to bite into than cold dark glass.

– ✞ –

Crowley brought him to an overgrown field, which was typical; for all his tailored suits, Crowley was the cheapest date Dean had ever had. Switchgrass spiked up from the ground in clumps to brush Dean’s calves, leaving patches of land bare and matted down. Not far, a few shabby buildings protruded from the field, the white paint on their wood-sided walls scabbed and pitted over. Backcountry Louisiana or Mississippi, Dean thought, trailer trash chic and proud of it. 

A crow eyed them derisively from where it perched grandly on a satellite dish that was streaked with rust and birdshit. “Really? The road to Hell is paved with cigarette butts and broken shingles?”

“Don’t simper. There’s a worn spot in the Veil off the road we can try to bring the gate up on, and it’s this or fly to Iraq to see if we can dig up the original point of descent.” Crowley’s voice was sharp, but his eyes shifted distractedly. He nodded to the ragged line of elm trees behind them. “Over there.”

Dean glanced over at the houses again. Crowley’d brought them down back behind the buildings anyway, but the way nearly all the shingles had been stripped off the roof and the shutters hung open, wide and witless, made Dean think that there hadn’t been anyone living there to see them in a long time. He turned and headed for the trees.

“The road,” as Crowley called it, was an unpaved dirt trench cut to ramble below the elms. Roots poked through the dirt and onto the path like grotesque fingers. Dean might’ve been able to get his car through the wide spots. Maybe. “Honey, you take me to the nicest places.”

“Up ahead,” Crowley said. “The cross.”

Dean’s eyebrows flew up. Tucked between a pothole and a twist of elm roots was a roughly-cut wooden cross, the kind people used to mark fatal car accidents. Now that was even richer than the idea of the entrance to God’s most secret chamber being the loose screen door of a random dilapidated house in any old Bumfuck, Hicksville, Nowhere. “God’s sense of humor on duty that day?”

“You haven’t been listening, have you, Dean-o? God had nothing to do with it.”

At the cross, Crowley drew a cocktail napkin from his breast pocket and unfolded it; dark, angular shapes bled through the paper.

“Dude, did you write down the ancient incantation to open a door to the under-est of the Underworld on an old napkin?” Dean asked, amused. “What language is that?”

“Sumerian, not that it’s of any relevance to you, and there’s not exactly a lot of paper lying around at most French wine bars. Now, if you’re capable, shut your trap for one bleeding moment, I’m not fluent and I need to concentrate.”

Dean mimed zipping his lips closed amiably, and with a last glare Crowley turned his irritable squint back to the napkin. He opened his mouth and began to chant, and the words took shape in the air in a strange rhythm, halting but sometimes rolling into a graceful flourish of half-familiar consonants. It turned Crowley’s voice weirdly soft, dragged it down into a low, near-musical register Dean had never heard from him before. And in front of him, what pale, sluggish light was falling on them through clouds so thick that the whole sky seemed a uniform shade of dull white began to warp, refracting itself like something coming up through deep water.

Crowley chanted, and by an unkempt dirt road in the boonies of Louisiana or maybe Mississippi, Dean caught the scent of salt cedar, then turpentine, then the scorching trace of sand, stretching endless and barren farther than you could walk in a lifetime. They came one after another, a faint trail and then gone, too quickly to be sure of what he was smelling. And something—bent, or inverted, and objectively, nothing about the light on them had changed but it had been 2 P.M. before and now Dean was suddenly sure that it was twilight and the sky was only lit up from catching light reflected from the sunken sun. There was a shaft in front of him, a passage as tall as him leading into the ground under the elm trees like a ravenous, sucking mouth.

“Well,” Crowley said, as if he was a bit stunned that it had worked himself. “ _Well._ ”

And around the gaping black presence of the—passage—that had just appeared was an arch, one that looked as though it had been twisted together out of the elm roots that still dangled out of the dirt walls of the rut they were standing in.

But it was old, too old to be from the same trees that slumped around them, and beautiful. There were shapes in the wood. They didn’t look like they’d been carved; they looked like they’d been _grown_ , two wooden women braided into the very fiber of the gate, one resplendent in turban and fine clothes and ornaments dripping from her neck and breast and fingers, one naked and dead-looking but with triumph carved into the lift of her cheek, the twist of her lips.

Dean caught the statues’ eyes and forced himself to take a breath, to run a thumb along the hilt of the Blade pressed reassuringly into his back, because he thought if he didn’t move then he might never move again. He breathed, and the women were just wood again.

Neat trick, Dean thought. More to the point—he whistled, and jerked his head to bring Crowley’s attention to the care paid to _every_ detail of the female figure. “I’ll say this for the Sumerians, they had their priorities right.”

The— _something_ —about the gate had caught Crowley, too. His eyes drifted over the words that had been blocked neatly over the arch in Roman letters, though still not in a language Dean recognized. “The arch’s a late addition,” he said distantly, like he could peel away Dean’s faintly mocking remarks to a question that might be at their heart. “Archaeologists, you know. Had it in their heads that there was a lover somewhere when the carving was made, was quite embarrassing when they dug up a few new tablets in ‘63 and had to reprint all the textbooks. But it made a much prettier story.”

“What’s it say?” Dean asked indulgently.

He’d been asking about the story, but it was the epitaph Crowley read out in the same melodic inflection he’d used to call the gate out of air and half-dead elm trees: “’To the house without exit for him who enters therein, / To the road, whence there is no turning, / Let the palace of the land of no return rejoice at thy presence.’”

Dean gave Crowley his best consoling smile. “No worries, it’s still ain’t as snappy as ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’”

Crowley ripped his gaze away from the arch. “You should know, Inanna’s Door isn’t like other ways in and out of Hell,” he said. “It wasn’t made by beings meant to cross between the worlds, like reapers, or souls. This—all of this—was carved out by a pagan god. They think in dreams, not physics. It’s not a spell, it’s a ritual.”

Dean held out his hands as if to say _myrrh me up_. “Ready when you are, boss.”

Crowley let slip a tiny smirk. “Not that kind of ritual.”

“Do I pay you for cryptic?”

“Dean-o, I could buy everything you’ve ever owned at least six thousand times over. Maybe eight, if we haggle.”

Cute. “How,” Dean said deliberately, “do I get in?”

“Force of spirit and will. But,” Crowley tipped his head toward the arch without looking, like it might keep his gaze for itself if he looked too long, “you start by stepping in there.”

“Aw, and I was willing to pony up a moderate blood sacrifice.”

“You’ll have the chance.” As warnings went, it was pretty feeble. Dean rolled his eyes. Crowley watched him and smiled. Something shrewd emerged in his expression to peek out from his deceptively human-seeming eyes. “If this _is_ the last time you’ll be moving about for a reason that’s not ‘writhing in eternal torment,’ I think you owe an old friend something.”

“See any old friends around here, Crowley?”

“Down, boy. You can’t flirt me off in an annoyed huff, those days are over. I just want to know something.”

Well, what the hell? It wasn’t like Dean cared whatever Crowley knew or didn’t know anyway. He inclined his head in invitation, a _go on, I’m listening_.

Crowley surveyed Dean coolly. “Why do you even care?”

An incredulous smile lighted on Dean’s lips. “Why do I _what?_ ”

“Why are you bothering with this—I don’t even know what this is. Rescue mission? Elaborate deception? Jealous tantrum? I can see the old you, the squishy mortal version with your squishy mortal guilt and your squishy mortal _feelings_ , doing something this stupid, but _you_ —I can’t puzzle it out. Castiel is dead. _Why do you even care?_ ”

A laugh burst from Dean’s lips. “I’m a demon, Crowley. I don’t need to care. I just have to want. And when I want to do something, _I do it._ ”

Crowley broke his gaze. His smirk turned dismissive, like he hadn’t expected anything truer, but he’d been compelled to ask. “I’ve known a lot of demons, Ghost Rider, and they all do what they want, sure. Usually, sex and death. It’s not like I blame them, they don’t get out much. But—here’s the rub—they have _wants_. Nothing too complicated, half the time it’s just a more efficient route to the sex and death, but there’s always _something,_ some ambition, some need.” Again, that considering gleam. “But not you, eh, Sparkles? You’re _not like other demons_. I could’ve stood in that bar in North Dakota and wheedled all night, offered you Hell and surrounding territories in a handbasket, and none of it would’ve convinced you to come to your senses. Because you don’t _want_ anything.”

“Maybe,” Dean leaned forward like he was confiding a great secret, “you’re just not as good of a salesman as you think you are.”

“Or maybe you’re _empty._ Demons are human souls, more or less, but the Mark has hollowed you out and made you into something else entirely. Which is why this little fixation of yours is so…fascinating. You don’t want Cas back, because you’re incapable of desire. So why go to all this trouble? Why,” he said, and now Dean could hear the thin trace of bitterness there like a brand, “do you _sodding_ care?”

“Tell you the truth, Crowley—it’s pure boredom.” Dean’s eyes went wide and guileless. “After six weeks I started getting a little sick of the Diet Cas-and-Dean thing we had. A man gets tired of the plastic pistol, you know? Ain’t no substitute for a real six-shooter.”

“Exactly,” Crowley said, “what I bloody expected.” When he looked at Dean again, he seemed perfectly bored and businesslike, no hint at all of their previous conversation on his face. “On your own pretty little head be it. Don’t eat the food, Dean. Don’t drink the water.”

“Hey, I got no interest in being your part-time wife. Weren’t we just talking about that?”

Crowley let out a harsh, scraping laugh. In front of them, the door they’d opened seemed to suck in the sound, like echoes were for the living. “Not because of that. Persephone is much bustier anyway.” Dean raised his eyebrows leniently, didn’t push it. “It _is_ a trap—not mine. The Gates are hungry. If you give them a reason to…imbibe, they will. And everything grown in Irkalla is theirs by rights, as is every soul that takes from there.”

Dean flicked his gaze towards the arch, where the coldly victorious eyes of a dead woman followed him. “Gates, huh? Like this one?”

“Seven, once you get inside. This—” his eyes followed the words again, _Let the palace of the land of no return rejoice at thy presence_ , “—isn’t a Gate; it’s a hunting snare.”

Dean smiled. A heat rose in his blood, not hunger or lust but the thing that warmed him when he was on the hunt. “Seven Gates. And Cas is behind the last one.”

“The sixth.”

“What’s the seventh?”

“The seventh,” Crowley said, “is the way out.”

Pleased, Dean said, “I knew you could be useful if you just put your mind to it.” He touched the hilt of the Blade again, and the blood sang in him hotter. It was gorgeous, heady, like walking into every fight he’d taken on knowing he would win, like having a hundred other guys and half a cosmic force on his side. 

_Got you_ , he thought to Cas, and it felt bracingly, shockingly, like prayer. _Getting you. And this time, no one gets to kill you except_ me _._

“Don’t wait up,” he smiled at Crowley, and let himself drift forward, like all it was was giving into the Door’s gravitational pull. Dean stepped into Hell’s pitch-dark maw.

Behind him, everything—the strangely pale not-twilight sky, Crowley with his hands in his coat pockets watching him go, the idol fashioned out of elm roots that had twisted around from her plinth on the arch to catch his descent with her dead, jubilant eyes—winked into nothingness.

– ✞ – ✞ – ✞ –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can only assume Abner tried to overthrow heaven to free his boyfriend.
> 
> Sumerian sounds like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhFm0iSt9zc).
> 
> The statues are Inanna/Ishtar, decked out in the seven layers that are stripped from her as she descends. Translation of the myth [here](http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr141.htm) and a good analysis [here](https://www.ancient.eu/article/215/inannas-descent-a-sumerian-tale-of-injustice/).
> 
> The thing about the archaeologists is true; they originally believed that Inanna went to the Underworld to bargain for her lover’s life back, but later tablets told a version where she went, kind of as an insult to Ereshkigal, died, and was brought back by a loyal servant—but someone had to take her place, and she picked her consort Duzumi after finding out he wasn’t mourning her at all.
> 
> Irkalla is the Akkadian name for Ereshkigal (who, like Hades, shares her name with her realm) the same way Ishtar is analagous to Inanna. Crowley uses “Irkalla” because, well, it’s less of a mouthful, and because the (mistranslated) love story is better associated with Ishtar and Irkalla than Inanna and Ereshkigal. And this is a love story.


	2. Libations

– ✞ – ✞ – ✞ –

A breeze stirred on his skin. Dean opened his eyes.

He still had one foot forward like he’d just taken a step into the mouth of Hell, but he had undeniably _moved_ , or been moved. He’d stepped into an underground tunnel in _Deliverance_ -land and walked into a forest at dusk. The sky pulsed red hotly through the leaves, though beneath the canopy shadows laced together so thickly Dean could barely see the laces of his boots.

It didn’t look like Hell—too much sky, not enough screaming souls dangling above and below in an endless plunge, no reprieve in sight—and Dean felt qualified to call himself an expert opinion on the subject. But the air felt stale on his tongue, like it couldn’t quite trick itself into losing the peculiar flavor of air that had been long trapped underground. And when he turned his head, the sky stretched out red and gruesome in all directions, no sun or other source of visible light in sight.

So—Hell. Sumerian goddess style. Dean rapped a tree trunk with the flat of the Blade, and it didn’t try to kill him or eat him. So, all in all, a much more pleasant experience than the last time he’d swung by.

“Pagan gods, man,” he told the Blade. “They get all the good stuff.”

No imminent danger, but also no helpful signpost pointing him towards a Gate. “Hello? Anyone there?” Dean tried, but the shadows swallowed up his voice and he got the sense that for all the trees around and hard brittle grass underfoot, nothing living had set foot there since the distinguished Inanna herself.

Of course not; that would’ve been too easy.

“ _Pagan gods,_ ” Dean grumbled again. Demons, at least, were straightforward. Seal the deal, go to Hell. He picked a direction and started walking.

– ✞ –

At first, the forest had reminded him of Purgatory—and that had amused him, the idea that he was again hunting down a wayward angel in a place where he could be confident that anyone who moved to meet him was foe, not friend, a strange land where he had nothing but a well-worn blade and the killer’s instinct—but the resemblance faded fast.

The stillness in Purgatory had been a watchful stillness, violence always ready to gush out at the first opportunity. There’d always been hunting noises in the distance or a nearby rustling that could be a garter snake or could be a rugaru, jaws already open for its meal. Here, a cold wind periodically fluttered across Dean’s skin, but the leaves never rustled; even Dean’s footfalls seemed muted. In the distance, there was no sound at all.

Dean walked, and walked—the sky never seemed to get any lighter or darker or redder—and finally sat down by a slope, a place where the trees seemed to thin out farther on. The forest was—strange—in other ways. The trees were all perfect, growing at regular intervals, no fallen logs or saplings, none of the detritus of real time passing. They were flowering, but not real flowers. He brushed open one of the buds of the tree he was sitting beneath and emerging from the leaves was an unlit fluorescent light bulb, the filament wired neatly into the branch off of which it budded.

“ _Pagan gods, man_ ,” he said again, feelingly, and let the bud spring back into place above his head.

He could, he thought, spend the rest of forever searching this forest. He didn’t get hungry, so Crowley’s warning about the food was thoughtful but idiotic, and it wasn’t like there was anything better to do topside than sleep around and occasionally kill something to break the monotony.

But there _was_ a way out, or at least a way deeper, and it was _irritating_ that it seemed to be purposefully keeping itself from him. He wanted to be done with this, to rub his success in Sam’s face, in Crowley’s, to see Cas’s pinched expression when he saw what, exactly, had pulled him out of the Pit. He wanted to flash his eyes black at Cas and tell him gravely, “I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from Perdition,” which was such a lovely image it made his totally superfluous heart beat a little faster in his chest.

He wanted to kill something.

The Mark flashed hot at the idea, and Dean let his head fall back hard against a particularly knobby part of the trunk. He wanted to kill something. It had been so long, too long, and he missed it: someone’s helpless grunts of pain and, in spite of themselves, fear; blood leaking onto his skin, and something warmer than blood, hard to define. _Life_ ruddying his hands, splattering onto his cheek and jeans, life like it was leaving whatever hapless demon and feeding into him, and the Mark, burning hotter than fireworks in heaven, than apple pie scalding his tongue, than the highest high he’d ever had human—

Nearby, rustling. And then something bumped his foot.

Dean’s eyes flashed open, and he coiled into a crouch, Blade already in his hand and raised to slash through the veins and arteries of—

A rabbit.

They stared each other down. It wasn't a real rabbit in the way that everything in this part of Hell wasn't quite real. It trembled like an actual fuzzy bunny rabbit would, its fur was coarse and thatched like the prairie hares that had overrun Bobby's salvage yard in July and August, but, tellingly, instead of eyes it had buttons neatly sewn to its face.

Dean poked at it with the hilt of the Blade; it shivered, but stood its ground.

"If you're supposed to be my spirit guide or something, this is a cop-out."

The rabbit-doll-thing hurled itself at his ankle again and bounced off his boot, looking as dazed as something with buttons for eyes could. Dean kept the Blade in his hand in case Hell really had decided to go after his dignity first, but the rabbit didn't Hulk out and tear his throat open Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog-style, so he was content to just relax back and survey Peter Button-eyes with pure bemusement for now.

"The hell does Hell need fluffy bunnies for anyway?” he asked it. “Give the Hellhounds something to Hellhunt?"

The rabbit just gnawed at the air with its disturbingly realistic-looking teeth and didn't answer. Typical. He finally came back to Hell, all smoky-eyed and ready to carve, and it decided to break him with futile frustration. And bunnies.

The _fucking bunny_ that was the only thing in this whole mindfuck of a world that had even a semblance of life or movement. So: a clue, from Inanna or Heaven's fucking finest or Hell itself, and whatever it was had decided to communicate with him through a semi-stuffed rabbit that for no reason at all reminded him of the Peter Rabbit toy he'd had until he was four, only about ten thousand times uglier now that it had real fur and real twitches.

Dean glanced around again just to make sure the rabbit hadn't hopped in with a helpful _human-shaped_ interdimensional travel agent, an uncool R2 to a hopefully-slightly-cooler Yoda (he'd always figured that if anyone was going to show up as the Virgil to his Dante it'd be Jimi Hendrix, but at this point he'd take the original crusty old poet), not really expecting anything.

But in one of the trees before him there was a raven watching him, and a cold finger of shock licked up Dean's spine.

 _It_ was wrong too, its shape constructed from iron-black gears, rusted-out nails, metal scrap; a set of gears ripped straight from a lawn mower overlapped on its wings like feather layers. The bird's cold copper eyes were fixed on him, but he hadn't felt _watched_ ; he'd been alone, _definitely_ alone, and yet the raven was studying him with a hungry intelligence.

It should’ve tripped every survival instinct Dean still had even though survival was more of a relative thing for him now, but still he was relaxed, still it _felt_ like it was just him and the rabbit until the turn of the earth. It was waiting on him, he thought, waiting to see what he would do. At his side, the rabbit snuffled, and though the sky bled scarlet above, the color barely touched its fur at all.

Dean found the raven’s gaze and grinned at it, warm, pleasant. Then he ripped the Blade through the rabbit’s left ear.

It screamed, the same piercing whistle the jackrabbits had made when Rumsfeld got his teeth into them. Dean watched with mild fascination as it writhed floppily by his boot, that rabbit-scream shrill in his ear until it ran out of breath and thrashed silently on the ground. Cotton fluff seeped from its ear like blood, but the Blade was a silent and disapproving weight in his hand; no satisfaction there.

Nothing changed—the light didn’t darken, the wind didn’t sharpen—but at once Dean felt the ugly sense that something had caught his scent, the scent of blood in the air.

He rolled to his feet and kicked the rabbit off to one side to tumble over a hillock and out of sight just as the tree he’d been sitting against moved. A thin, switchlike branch slammed into his right shoulder so hard that the Blade clattered out of his grip.

Dean reeled away, but the branch had snagged his arm somehow and jerked him backwards. He stared with moderate horror as the thin tendrils at the end of the branch seemed to grow _into_ his skin, up his forearm towards where the Mark pulsed furiously against the foreignness in his blood like the world’s darkest, grossest veins.

“Shi—”

A vine—or—was that a cable? was that a _fucking_ computer cable—whipped around his neck and jerked him back like a noose. He choked on a curse and wrenched his arm away hard enough to break off the twigs in his skin. Dean threw himself forward, feeling the _thing_ wrapped around his neck tighten viciously, but he was a demon, he didn’t need to breathe—but even with the rope a white line of pain radiating from his neck into his skull, the Blade was just out of reach.

And around him, the trees were beginning to _ripple_. Bulges moved under the bark, like tree tumors swimming through the trunk, and Dean had the distinct suspicion that they were getting ready to grow into—well, into _him._

 _Shit,_ Dean thought sourly. So he probably shouldn’t have killed his only clue just to make a point. To a bird. After the third time they’d had to change bases because Dean had caused too much of a scene in too small of a town, Crowley had snapped, _When are you going to get some bloody self-control?_ The words bounced around in his head now, singsongy and smug and enraging.

The vine around his neck tensed and then tossed him face-first into another tree. He sternly reminded himself that he didn’t have to worry about concussions now, no matter what his head was telling him. Pain radiated through his right arm—the second tree had picked up right where the first had left off—and he’d landed hard enough to bruise his hip on something in his pocket. _Something in his pocket,_ and the next branch aimed at his heart—

He shoved his left hand into his jeans and pulled out the cheap Bic lighter he still carried around on reflex.

It caught on the first try, thank fucking Jesus, it was always hit or miss with the $1 checkout aisle lighters, and he ground the flame into where the branch had grafted into the skin of his forearm. The whole tree spasmed, the limb reaching for his chest rearing back like a spooked horse.

A few inches above where living wood fed into his body the branch burned and crumpled into ash. Free. Dean rolled away, grimly pushing down the body's remembered reflex to hurl, and took off away from the grove of killer trees. He snagged the Blade from where it had fallen as he went.

Behind him, the trees bulged angrily. Dean hoped fervently that they weren't growing legs to go after him.

"Ents! Goddamn _Ents_ ," he panted, "can't believe I was thinking about the goddamn Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog when the real danger was the _freaking Ents_ —”

His arm burned as he ran flat-out through the trees. He recognized the pain of healing by now; hopefully whatever Satanic force kept his heart thrumming while other meatsuits just hardened into corpses doubled as protection for, like, tree-transmitted diseases. It would be just _perfectly him_ to beat death a time or three only to wither away from _Hell tree rabies_.

"Cas," he said conversationally, "when I save your life, I'm gonna _fucking kill you_."

Dean ran, and the absolute silence of this plane thrummed in his ears. A fistfight with a couple of trees and the only sounds he'd heard had been his own ragged breath.

– ✞ –

Later: a raven calling.

It called with a low, mournful warble that fuzzed when it reached for too high of a note, like music through bad speakers. Dean remembered the patches of rust like feather rot on the mechanical bird that had measured him so coldly; he knew that sound, though he'd never heard it before. With resignation, he set off towards where the call had managed to slip faintly through the absolute silence.

The trees hadn't followed. Well, they hadn't needed to, since he was heading back in that direction of his own free will. He stepped back through the woods, eying the trees and the occasional places where bark had peeled away to expose circuit boards or corrugated cardboard with distaste. The fakeness of this forest was surprisingly unsettling.

There was just something about how if he didn’t look too closely he could be going for a sunset stroll in a suburban park somewhere, about how the man-made sprouted seamlessly from the natural jungle. A sense of misplacement; a glitch in the Matrix. Like a cat with zebra stripes. Or a demon looking out of a man’s eyes.

This was a trap. Obviously it was a trap, but he was the idiot who'd learned his ex-friend was in Hell and thought it would make a nice day trip. Now that he’d had a few moments to recover, he figured that walking into whatever the forest that had just tried to kill him had planned was probably the smartest decision he'd made all day. The trees, at least, probably knew where the Gate was.

But the sound wasn't bringing him to get whomped by the willows after all. Dean trailed after it until the trees parted into a neat clearing where the sky bore down unhindered on the Gate rising from the center.

Probably it had once been beautiful, but time and misuse had broken it into a ruin. It was an arch of pure white stone, marble maybe, and over the doorway and columns ran a sculpted filigree. But graffiti, dyed vicious dark colors by the redness of the sky, crept over the arch’s front and sides. A massive crack spiraled up over the doorway, and loose stone and spiderwebs dangled from the split.

Perched at the tallest point of the arch was the metal raven.

Dean’s eyes narrowed at the bird where it had hooked its metal talons delicately around a crumbling marble flourish at the crown of the arch. “Tired of attempted murder?”

The bird said nothing, just kept him fixed in its stony gaze, and again the contradiction of being weighed by a cutting intelligence and feeling totally, utterly alone settled on him. Dean scowled. “Don’t start that again,” he said, stepping fully out from the tree line. “I thought we bonded? Hey, Mr. Owl, why do good things happen to bad—”

_PAIN._

Dean gasped but his lungs seemed to have stopped working so it was more of a wheeze; and pain, tearing pain, like someone had punched through his sternum and was pulling his ribs out through the hole (and he _remembered_ the feeling)—Sam, Dad, their last screaming match, Sam’s bag already packed, $100 for a one-way bus ticket cross-country in his back pocket—the kind of pain that started in the chest and radiated through the entire body, fingers shooting pain as the lungs struggled to bring air to the body—heart monitor, they never even tried to take out the bullet, _did your uncle ever make his wishes known in regards to organ donation_ —pain enough to make his heart race, to narrow his vision down to the lights swimming in his eyes, and beyond that red and red and red—the knife he doesn’t see the knife TURN AROUND SAM—pain to hollow him out, until it was the only thing he could think about, the only thing he _was—_ watching him dissolve and there was no body to bury, to hold to him until he believed it was true—he was light with it, a body fashioned from air and this feeling held together with staples and pins—laughing so hard his lungs seemed to have stopped working, Cas not getting it at all but smiling at his smile, lurid pink lights throwing shadows on his face, in his hair—

So loud, it was _so loud_ —

Dean scrabbled for air—emotion like a storm surge, like a losing fight—despair-loss-fear-transcendent fucking joy slamming into him, one after the other or all at once. His fingers curled into the dirt as he tried to sit up, to roll onto his hands and knees, but— _grief_ —his eardrums were vibrating out of his head, so loud his own thoughts felt like a mistuned orchestra in his brain, and— _euphoria_ —a man’s voice screaming (Sam? Cas? but neither was here, so it had to be his own voice), and—a feeling he could only describe as what apple pie felt like—the raven watching him, still as marble, still as stone.

Red light above ( _sympathy_ ) and huge black lilies ( _hurt_ ) budding from the trees ( _desire,_ longing, wanting so vicious he was sick with it)—but that wasn’t right.

The trees around him were all laden with dark, curling blooms, but through the blur over his vision he could see their metallic sheen. Not lilies: phonograph horns, their metal stems budding smoothly from the hard weathered wood of the tree branches. And trembling with violent sound.

Or maybe that was him.

He couldn’t stand but he hadn’t gotten very far into the clearing at all before keeling over. With every nerve in his supposedly dead body both sizzling agony like a third-degree burn and lit up with ecstatic joy, he reached up where moments or hours ago he’d caught a glimpse of red light on brass. One hand caught hold of the unnatural flower blooming above his head; the First Blade was already in the other. Dean cut cleanly through the horn.

Once the Blade passed through, the brass crumpled into peat and ash into his hand. And for a moment, everything—the forest, the Gate, the way his fingers had trembled on the Blade’s hilt—blinked out in the face of an unprompted blast of cold, creeping rage. His world narrowed down to the ache in his fists to let loose into something he loved and the way his insides seemed to harden into ice, brittle and numbing, when he looked at someone and thought that one day, he _would_ kill them. He couldn’t tell if the memories called the anger or if it was the anger calling the memories, but for a moment Dad was dying for him again, his throat was rubbed raw like he’d been guzzling whiskey by the bottle instead of screaming at a hapless insurance agent again, Sam was telling him he’d run off the first moment he could possibly get away with it to have a normal fucking life with a normal fucking _dog_ again. 

And then it was all back, the deception of a forest and the rotting marble arch and the unchanging red sky, and for a single, vital moment, the air was still and silent.

Dean flung himself out of the clearing and slumped back against a tree. Maybe the one he’d just mutilated.

A trap. He’d known it would be a trap, but he’d been caught in it anyway. Dean Winchester, Apocalypse-ender, Knight of Hell, vanquished at last by emotions. Somewhere, some piss-ass god was having a good laugh at that.

His face was wet.

He was standing in a fake forest where trumpet bells grew on trees and blasted paincomfortmiserywant instead of sound, and there was no way he was getting farther than two steps towards the Gate without his head imploding from the noise. And he could cut off the horns, but—

But something had passed between the forest and him when he’d sliced through the horn, something had seeped into his skin like plant sap, and it had settled into him with a permanence that frightened him as much as anything did nowadays. A faint vein of rage still throbbed in him like something had awakened in him, like once he’d felt that kind of anger— _remembered_ that kind of anger—pure and absolute enough to blot out the rest of the world, it had irrevocably become a part of him. He’d cut open a brass flower and an old fury had shaken free to rattle down his bones and blood. He felt angry—he felt like he _could_ be angry, really angry, not the demon’s approximate, for the first time in…since he died.

If he sliced apart every lurid black flower, he could get to the Gate.

If he sliced apart another lurid black flower, it would _infect_ him with its weakness. Exhume the agony, the anger, that dying had buried deep—and other things. A full blast of them had brought him shaking to his knees. So he could take that on willingly. Or wither here.

The best gift that dying had given him. _It knew_ , Dean thought, and lifted his gaze to meet the raven perched serene as ever on the pitted, marked-up waste of something that used to be beautiful.

Anger surged up in a nauseating rush. “You _knew,_ ” he spat, at the raven, at the forest, but he didn’t get even a feather-twitch or a rustling leaf in answer. Of course not; it was a goddamn bird.

He brutally beat down the wrath flicking hot in his throat. Because it didn’t matter. It didn’t _matter_ that going on meant giving up the freedom from the guilt and bitterness that had poisoned every moment of his living existence. He _wasn’t alive._ He was a demon, and he could control this, too.

This, too. He could control this, too.

That was what he concentrated on as he made a slow circle around the clearing, lopping off gramophone horns and grimly keeping hold of the urge to shake apart when something else he’d forgotten poured into him—the faces and times and _feeling_ , fucking feeling, it was all blurring together now, and it was Jo spiking the eggnog and Cas burning on the ceiling—memories like butter and syrup, thick and cloying and drowning. This was nothing. This was _nothing_ —

—desolation, and that was Sam telling him _it_ _’s okay, Dean, it’s going to be okay, I’ve got him_ , that was a hundred hunter’s funerals at a hundred illicit pyres, that was the first night he’d spent in a motel room with smoke still lingering on his PJs and his father like a shadow by the window all night, hand never leaving his shotgun—

Just a con man’s trick (a con god’s trick), a sacrifice that could be cheated, could be worked around—

—pride, and that was Sam making the long shots with a sawed-off even though he could barely see over the barrel they shot from, that was Ben playing air guitar to _Kashmir_ —

And it had to be done, only one way forward—

—betrayal, and that looked just like Cas’s eyes turned pale and bright by holy fire—

Because turning back, of course, had never even been in the realm of possibility at all.

It was a long moment before Dean realized that it was done, that the flowers were all dust trapped in his boot treads and whatever emotional cocktail that had been _in them_ had all made its way into him.

When he could move he limped forward into the clearing again, but he hadn’t taken more than two steps before he found himself stumbling; no sonic wall of _feeling_ this time, though, he’d just tripped, which was almost worse. He made a face at the lump that had gotten in the way of his boot but pulled back when he caught a better glimpse of it.

It was the rabbit.

It lay there, a deflated lump of fur and cotton fluff, but its chest still moved in shallow flutters. Dean stared at the slope he’d lurched down unseeingly and realized slowly that he’d been attacked by treants just over that ridge a few yards away.

Without having to look, he was very sure of two things: the raven was watching him again, and the rabbit was dying. He could see the ragged hole of its missing ear trailing chunks of loose fur and batting in the dirt. Stuffing leaked out with every tiny rise of its chest.

Something strange and rusty from disuse crawled through him. When he knelt and cleanly cut through the hide and stuffing at its throat with the Blade, it was as much to push back down that _feeling_ that was so horribly like pity as much as anything.

And that raspy raven call again, much closer this time.

A flash of dull black swooped down on Dean, who swallowed down a grunt as he fell back, barely catching himself with one hand scraping on dirt and wispy grass. This close, he could hear the mechanical whir of gears in the raven’s wings keeping it airborne. A faint brush on his forehead with its talons—and he felt _lighter_ somehow, how was that possible? like he’d been carrying a weight there he hadn’t noticed until it was gone, but there’d been nothing there—and the raven was gone, wheeling up into the trees. He watched it go, that sense of non-presence finally lifting. Like it had gotten what it was sent here for.

Too tired to think about it any further, Dean lurched to his feet and on to the Gate, ignoring the way his hands still trembled, disgusted with himself, still seeing the severed ear of the rabbit when he closed his eyes.

– ✞ –

He'd moved again. His shadow towered over him. Against the fluorescent bubbly signatures layered over the alley wall, it sort of looked like a mural, some vast, ancient giant hewn from graffiti and darkness. Urban planners stuck the weirdest shit all over their walls nowadays.

Dean glanced around, took in the uneven gravel letting water puddle around his boots and the pitted sand-brick walls, and let himself slump against a particularly spiky piece of spray-paint art to catch his breath. Right. So one Gate down, and he might be, perhaps, possibly, a little in over his head.

That was the weakness talking, he thought at himself sternly. He put a hand over his eyes and didn't move until the leftover shockwaves from those bursts of resurrected emotion felt less like heartburn and more like the familiar dull ache of repression.

When he finally felt like himself again— _new_ himself, not needy self-righteous pathetic himself—he shook his head to clear it out and let darkness flick over his eyes, partly to remind himself that he could and partly because the graffiti really was that eye-searingly bright. Okay, thinking. He could do that. In the last—realm, or dimension, or, hell, game level—he'd passed within, what, twenty yards of the Gate and hadn't noticed anything at all. So if the god-logic held true, it probably didn't matter how thoroughly or quickly he searched for the second Gate; the world would warp around him Escher-style when it thought he could handle it.

If this alley was any indication, he was probably safe from homicidal treeborgs for now; this set piece was way less Narnia, way more deserted shantytown. The lane was claustrophobically narrow, both ends curving crookedly out of sight. Power lines stretched over his head like streamers, some of them dangling loose where rats or bad installation had gotten to them, and the walls, massive pale brown bricks that had probably looked nice when they were new, were held together more with dust than mortar.

Where the forest had been oppressively dark, it was pretty light out now, confirming to Dean that time was more of a fun embellishment here than an actual quality of reality, but fog creeping low over the walls kept him from being more precise than that. The air still tasted incongruously thick and musty. And it was still eerily quiet, but not the choking absolute silence of the forest—Dean could hear the wind pulling taut on the cables like harp strings and water dripping into a puddle somewhere farther down in the dark—a lonely quiet, the silence of a place that remembered the people that used to live there.

Maybe the graffiti was ghost graffiti, Dean thought dryly. Haunted paint, that’d be new. Of course Hell would find a way of punishing him for losing his lighter.

And there was something wrong with his shadow.

There wasn’t a light to cast it, but it still loomed out at him from where it was splashed onto the wall, too large, too dark. Dean frowned at it and waited to see whether it would rush him—it would make a horrible kind of sense if Hell had picked him apart and decided that what he needed was to fight first emotions and then his own shadow—but it just hung, shadow-like, on the wall in front of him. Still, the trees had looked harmless at first, too.

He gave it one last _I'm watching you_ glare before he turned and picked an end of the alley to explore. Even if his shadow did end up rushing him, the First Blade could probably kill it; it was handy like that.

From where he still had hold of it, it murmured lowly at the thought.

– ✞ –

The alley hadn't been built on even ground, and sets of two or three steps had been set into the path whenever it dipped or rose slightly. Dean had worked construction in Cicero and knew that modern bricklayers and landscapers had ways of smoothing out topographical wrinkles, but he was beginning to suspect this part of the city had been built a long time before concrete mixers and road graders.

A few windows had been set into the wall he was following, some of them with warped wood frames but most of them just cut into the stone. He'd passed a few doorways, but nothing that particularly screamed _Gate_ (he'd stuck his fingers in them just to check), all in an arch shape that made Dean suspect he definitely wasn't in Kansas, or even in the Western hemisphere, anymore. _Iraq_ , Crowley had said. But it didn't look like the news footage, either.

Everywhere, graffiti, and everywhere the rubble of abandoned life: a metal tin dog bowl set on a stoop full of stagnant mossy water, a cracked clay plate perched on a windowsill. No animals right out of a Silent Hill movie rushed to greet him, but the fog followed him as he walked. So did his shadow, seemingly independently of the constraints of physics. More quickly than he would’ve expected, he came to an edge and had to stop.

A _literal_ edge. Fuck.

The street just…ended. It fell off into what looked like a sheer cliff face that bounded the buildings Dean had been walking between, their walls pressed so neatly to the precipice that it seemed like some massive knife had come out of the sky and just chopped away the rest of the earth.

He crept closer to the edge until he could peer over cautiously, half-convinced that now was the moment his shadow or maybe zombified city-dwellers would take solid form and shove him over, but the city stayed empty and when he looked, all he saw was fog and mist all the way down. The ground curved back underneath him and when he looked to either side the cliff continued on along with the buildings and, okay, suddenly he was very sure that this wasn't a cliff, that under the city the ground just _ended_ and under that was just air.

Not fog—clouds. Dean threw himself backwards when the first wave of vertigo hit.

Demoning up had cured him of the occupational joint aches and the way anything over a Scoville 50,000 knocked out his taste buds for a week, but it hadn't done anything for the flying phobia, which was so hardwired into his psyche that he suspected not even an angelic memory-wipe could get rid of it. It wasn't the horrible gruesome death thing, at least not anymore; he rather suspected that if he fell out if an airplane the Mark of Cain would eventually pull his splattered guts and limbs back together. And it wasn't the height thing, though it was also definitely unnatural to be over the cloud layer. It was just that planes were clearly _not meant to leave the ground_. Once in his twenties he'd tried to cure himself by figuring out the mechanics of the thing, and while he more or less grasped lift and thrust and pressure differentials abstractly, he’d given up in disgust when he realized the answer basically boiled down to “the wings are a speedbump for the air.”

And now he was standing on what he strongly suspected was a hunk of earth that was just…hanging in the sky, relying on whatever perversion of nature let electronics grow on trees to keep it aloft. Great. Okay. Great, that was…great.

Extremely glad everyone he knew and no longer cared about was _not_ there to witness him press his forehead to the brick path and wait out the nausea, he tried his best to just delete the last minute and a half from his brain. "Cas," he said into the dirt, "I'm gonna fucking _kill you_ ," and then he had to stop talking while the last thing he ate, which was probably motel pretzels from when he’d checked in at Fleabag Central four days ago, made a valiant attempt at escape.

All right, he could do this. Just…find the Gate, get off the floating island. Dean got to his feet slowly. "Other direction," he said to his shadow. "Wrong…direction."

He turned and marched off, but he couldn't help himself from stealing one last look at where the ground broke off into nothingness and that long, long drop.

– ✞ –

The other way brought him out onto a wide boulevard. All the buildings were made out of that dusty sand-colored brick, and everything exuded the same sense of long neglect. Actually, Dean had woken up in the nice alley in town. Off the main road, he could see that some buildings had just crumbled where they stood, whole walls and ceilings just collapsed in on themselves.

He wandered through the streets sticking his hand through doorways and keeping an eye out for people, creepy animals, or hidden cliffs he might just stroll off of—he had a bleakly paranoid notion that the the drop was a symbol or some shit and the only way forward was inevitably _down_ —but, no, nothing. This place was truly deserted, no animal scat or stray pests that would’ve taken over a real city by now. Part of it was probably the "hovering probably about a thousand feet off the ground" aspect of it all, but even then: birds. Dean stepped over cracked ceramic basins and empty pipes jutting exposed out of the curb and waited for Hell to point the way.

His first hint of anything that remotely looked like a signal was a moldy wooden sign that had been taken off its post and leaned against a wall. He bent to read it and his vision swam; it seemed to say "THE LIFE-GIVING PLANT" and "OVER DOOR AND BOLT, DUST HAS GATHERED" and "PALACE" all at once, the words drifting over each other and sending a headache spiking through his brain.

“Okay,” he gritted out, “I’m going, okay, I’m going.”

The words didn’t resolve at all. Dean scowled and turned away, but before he turned onto the street that hopefully led to the _palace—_ the sign could’ve been facing any direction when it had been standing, after all—he surreptitiously checked for birds that might be watching him go. The fog shrouded the street too thickly to tell, and he set off unsettled, one eye on the shadow that still stretched out beside him like it was sunset in a bad Western.

He’d guessed the right direction, or it had never mattered anyway, since the end of the street brought him to probably the most palace-like of any of buildings on this floating death trap. Low towers surfaced out of the mist at each corner, and the metal frame of what had once probably been a glass dome rose from the roof. As palaces went, it was deeply unimpressive, about the size of a City Hall in a mid-sized town, but Dean was getting used to disappointment. Hopefully whatever was guarding the Gate had withered away a long time ago and he could just stroll right through.

Like basically everywhere else, the door had been broken down, or removed, or had just rotted away over time. Dean had to duck his head to get under the doorjamb. He stepped into a massive room, probably the size of the whole block, the empty panes in the dome overhead letting fog and mist drift down inside.

And inside, a person. A woman, hunched over herself, on a raised dais in the center of the room in a chair that looked awfully like a throne.

Dean studied her. Not a corpse, not a construct; he could see her breathing, _felt_ her existence in the way that the raven's beady metal eyes on him had been all absence. She wore shockingly blue plate armor, gilded at the edges and dotted with gold arabesques. The mace that hung at her hip was crystalline, fashioned from a massive gem the same color as her armor, but the throne beneath her was gold and looked carved from it, the armrests both full-size statues of kneeling men that, if it weren't for the oddly blank expressions on their faces, might've been real men turned to Midas gold. And the backrest was an angel, abstractly drawn features contorted in thunder and wrath, wings half-spread behind him to catch light on the tips of his flight feathers.

And everywhere else—gold. Filling the room were shelves and crates that looked one good push away from collapsing entirely, overflowing with rough-edged silver coins, jewelry, little statuettes in the style of the old, Old World that, in spite of the dust and cracks spiderwebbing the clay, looked way too good for two thousand years in a ratbox. They threw shadows like Dean’s that stretched across the floor, deep dark silhouettes with no light to cast them.

And all of it was crumbling. All that finery, enough that Dean found himself wondering what the city had looked like before the ghosts had moved in, and all of it caked in dust and grime thick enough that only a hint of the true wealth underneath peeked through.

Dean paced closer to the woman now, skirting the edge of the treasure hoard (and palming a coin or two, but who could blame him?). Glass crunched under his boots, but she didn’t look up; her hair fell in a dark sweep down past her knees to obscure her expression, but Dean thought she might be ignoring him.

“Thought no one else ever came down this way,” he said casually.

At last, she lifted her head. She looked at him with cool disregard, didn’t answer.

Maybe she didn’t speak, either. It’d be his luck. He thought about rushing her but leveled a smile in her direction instead, having the same philosophy on imaginary women as he did on real ones: it never hurt to try. And…he was curious. “’Course, if no one ever comes down this way, what’s with all the graffiti?”

She did speak at that. Her voice was surprisingly low but smooth, with no sign of the years that had wound by around her. “Others have come. Not this way, they come in the tracks of other gods, but the method is the same.”

Dean’s eyebrows flew up. It was shocking how pleasant it was to hear someone other than himself speak. “Others have come for the angels?”

“Others have come for the _souls_. Their daughters, brothers, wives. Those lost from them to the house where over door and bolt, dust has gathered, the palace of the land of no return. They pay the same toll you do, though _you,”_ her voice flattened out in dispassion, “have a different destination in mind.”

“That’s me. Always the trailblazer.”

She looked him up and down, coolly severe. She had a nice face, clear dark skin and sharply angular features, but there was something razor-wire dangerous about her that sapped any thought he might have about things other than the lethally spiked mace. “Dean Winchester.”

“Heard of me? You got me at a disadvantage, then. ‘Cause I’ve got no clue who you are.”

Her mouth curved minutely like she hadn’t smiled in all the years she’d been sitting here. “I am not a _who._ I am—” a sound rolled off her tongue, _k-_ something, there and gone before Dean could catch the rhythm of it.

"Take your word for it,” he said. “So who'd you come for?"

"God," she said.

He smirked, wished Cas were here to share the joke. "Yeah? How'd that go?"

"I carried her up. I turned away the vast riches of the Underworld, the lie of grain and water that smells purer and sweeter than truth, and returned the Queen of Heaven to her throne." Her eyes, Dean thought, were the same dark, flinty blue as her armor; and there was something hard and shining in them that made him think that they _had_ been whittled out of stone. "And then I returned, to serve the sentence that Ereshkigal demands of those to make demands of her."

Inanna. She’d come—with? for?—Inanna.

She’d been sitting here a very long time, then.

“You had to stay,” Dean sounded out slowly.

“You do not steal from Death; you may only bargain.”

His voice sharpened like a well-cut blade. “So what’s the toll? The one I have to pay?”

“The one you _are_ paying.”

“Sure. And?”

“Dean Winchester,” she said, the sounds of his name turned strange and unfamiliar in her low, steady cadence, “Knight of Hell, Michael Sword, man of another god—why are you here?”

Dean smiled, cocked his head at her. "Who fucking cares?"

The first face he'd seen in worlds of solitude, and it considered him now with unnatural stillness, not a flicker of movement but that intangible sense of a smile. "Why have you come here?"

"Been everywhere else, right?” Dean said. “Came to round out my passport stamp collection."

"A man of so many smiles. But why are you here?"

"Hey, hey, I’m a collector. It’s a passion thing. Sure, it’s monsters, not stamps, though, you got me. Killed a lot of baddies up top, but I ain’t ever killed a dead angel before. Or—you know what?—I ain’t ever killed a five-thousand-year-old goddess before either."

The woman said, unfazed, still with a hint of curve to her mouth, "Why are you here?"

"Not even a chuckle? Tough room." Irritation knifed through him, sharper and bitterer than he'd felt in months. Fucking phonograph trees. He pushed it down, away—it was _weakness_ , and he could control it. Okay, she wouldn't play along. What did it matter? Hell—all of it, every demon and Hellhound and the firmament itself—knew what he'd come for already. "Fine. There's an angel who's been a very bad boy and got himself sent to time-out. I'm here for him."

"That is not the answer that will gain the next Gate for you."

"You want a lie? I could lie. I'm _awesome_ at that."

"That you are here for an angel is truth. But not _the_ truth."

"Oh, great. Philosophy."

Something shifted in the air, and when the woman spoke next, her voice seemed to have calcified, grown brittle and tremendous like thunder. "What the land of no return asks of you will only ever be dearly bought. You lie and deflect and smile to keep this answer safe within you, to keep from speaking the truth of yourself. You tell me it is nothing? Then why not let it be said? _Why are you here, Dean Winchester?_ "

Crowley’s voice, like a bolt through the air, through his bones: _Why do you even care?_

Dean glanced up at the dome above their heads, the sky without sun that still sent down white light through the clouds, all the riches of a dead religion not exactly glittering with it but shining all the same.

“Life after death just got real boring real fast,” he said.

“No,” she said.

Dean sighed gustily and rubbed his palm into the bridge of his nose. “That was the _truth_ , you—fine. I…He saved me a long time ago. I don’t get the warm fuzzy feelings anymore, but I do get debt.”

“No.” Her eyes glinted hard and blue.

His teeth ground together so loudly he thought the stupid fucking raven could hear it from wherever it was. His fingers tightened on the Blade; he wondered whether drawing it across the woman’s throat would be more satisfying than the rabbit’s death. “That’s all I’ve _got._ ” He hadn't let go of the First Blade once, and he ran a finger over the dips and curve of the jawbone now. “You don’t think I’m not willing to try it the hard way?”

She shifted; the mace at her hip caught the light and spun a shatter of blue in every direction. Dean swallowed. His throat felt unaccountably dry. Something very distantly like amusement dyed her voice when she said, “You would be outmatched, Knight of Hell. But I am tired. Unlike you, I had nothing to give as ransom. And that was a very long time ago.” She settled back into the same position she’d taken since she’d first spoken, elbows braced on her thighs, gauntlets clasped in front of her. "It's only a question. And then, the Gate. Dean Winchester, why are you here?”

Something hot and bright was burning in his throat. He stared at a cracked urn that had spilled gold and blue stones, flecked with gold themselves, by her feet for a long time before he answered. He thought he knew what she wanted to hear, but it was a bitch and a half to pin down the itch that had started up in him when he’d seen Cas’s corpse, to wrestle it into words and breathe it out.

“God,” he said, “had a fucked up idea of a just reward. And this-” he blinked, let the black truth of himself glimmer out from beneath his eyes— “is what has to be. I get that. Hell, I like it. But Cas? Fuck God. I can do better.”

The woman exhaled, and her breath was shaped like words, like a scrap of poetry. _Pour out pure waters, pour out fine oil, the love of my youth is dead_ , Dean heard-and-didn’t-hear. She caught him in her solid blue gaze and the words faded from thought like a dream. “Come.”

The dirty grin wasn’t smart, but it was reflex. “You first, darlin’.”

“ _Closer_ , Dean Winchester.”

Even though she’d cut it (and him) down to size with great prejudice, Dean kept a secure hold on the Blade as he moved closer. If he was actually the first person she’d spoken to in five thousand years, there was certainly no slack in her gaze to show for it. She eyed the Blade with that same glint of nearly-amusement she’d had when he’d slid into outright threats. “Your offering was freely given; I will not harm you.”

“Funny, most of the girls I meet are into a man who brought his own protection to the party.”

She watched him until he grudgingly stepped close enough for her to touch. And then, to his surprise, she did—she lifted an arm, metal creaking thunderously in the joints and gaps of her armor, brought it to his neck and collarbone.

He jerked back and turned narrow eyes on her. Her fingers came to a slow rest in the air a breath away from the dip in his throat. “I will not harm you. I only want the weight around your neck.”

What, he almost said, but then her fingers closed around nothing and pulled and weight _lifted_ from around his neck _._ Just like last time— “What the _h—”_

And her hand was back, this time sliding into his pocket, and only the total absurdity of this turn kept him from trying to stick the Blade through it, outmatched or not. Then, to his slight horror, she drew out the coin he’d lifted earlier. Dean shoved away the surrealism of the invisible necklace conundrum to think about later and hastily turned the charm back up to 11. “Hey, wonder how that got there? Magic quests, am I right?”

“You won’t need it,” she told him. “That’s not how you pay the boatman.”

 _So what do you pay the boatman?_ he should’ve asked. The rational thing to do would definitely have been to ask, “What do you pay the boatman?” But clay or dust or just the grit of time passing caught in his throat and he lost the moment, and then where he was standing in her shadow, her impossible swollen shadow, _the fucking floor opened up_ _under him_ and he was falling, plummeting through the clouds, scream whipped away by the wind and mind entirely consumed by grim disgust and the thought _I fucking knew it._

– ✞ –

His eyes flew open and he sat up with such force that he almost sailed off the bed head-first. Morning sunlight blared out at him through a crack in the curtains and for a moment it seemed like only a dream: dying, Cas, _falling_.

He hadn't dreamed in a long time, though, which was usually one of the best things about being a demon. Reality resumed like a brick to the solar plexus.

Dean rolled over and tried to smother himself in a pillow. " _Bitch_ ," he spat.

Who the hell just _tossed someone off a floating island_ like that? _Pagan fucking gods_ , of fucking course. No courtesy. He hadn't even made more than a token attempt at threatening to kill her, and the hollow gnawing in his gut was starting to grow sharp enough that it might even have been worth trying. He gave himself another two minutes to simmer in it before he got up to meet whatever new horror Angel Hell had waiting for him. He sat up to cast a cynical eye over—

The whitest, blandest hotel room he'd ever been in.

Dean goggled. If there were an interior decorating version of Wonderbread, this was it. Walls the off-white of unpainted plaster, blue striped sheets that matched the faux-wholesome blue of the door, bare bulbs, a bedframe that looked straight out of army surplus. Over the course of his sad, sad life, Dean had spent a _lot_ of time in a _lot_ of hotel rooms, and not even the $30-a-night roach palaces put this little effort into their color schemes.

"Couldn't spring a little extra for the nice furniture, huh?" he asked whatever semi-divine son of a bitch was orchestrating his suffering. There was even a boxy little TV on a battered little dresser, which was a nice touch.

Gingerly, he swung his boots off the bed and settled them onto the floor, testing to make sure it wasn't going to swing open from under him and _deposit him into empty space_ again. "Scarred for life.”

He judged the carpet, which was the pink-brown shade preferred by low-budget slobs everywhere, solid enough to chance going over and fiddling with the TV dials. It turned on well enough—not just for flavor, then—but after that, his years of experience coaxing shitty motel TVs into working failed him. All the channels were set to static, neither a helpful newscast pointing him to the next Gate or a _Ring_ -style specter crawling out of the box at him in sight. He rolled his eyes. "Don't know what I expected.”

Outside the door. Footsteps.

He'd set the Blade down on the TV set to fiddle (he'd considered the bed, but then imagined the mattress growing a mouth or a saggy spot or literally anything else and swallowing the only weapon he'd bothered bringing on the trip) but he snatched it up now and flattened himself against the wall. A faint shuffling got through the authentically paper-thin walls. A soft thump—small feet? Sneakers? A kid?

Dean felt for the doorknob.

He threw the door open and stuck his head out just in time to catch—nothing.

Well, _no one_. There was a whole lot of _something_ outside.

The motel was motor lodge-style, with a few stories of rooms leading outside and a exterior stair hugging a wall dotted with identical blue doors. Dean had woken up on the second floor and was now looking out over a classic two-lane blacktop running beside the motel. And the whole street looked like it had been ripped right out of a Route 66 postcard: shops and apartment buildings and gas stations and restaurants, all lined up against the road like it was their reason for existence, nothing but desert fading into low, hazy mountains stretching out both before and after this little knot of civilization.

And the people.

People! Signs of life! Someone wandering out of the diner two doors over from the motel, a couple of kids playing by the side of the grocery store, a woman sitting on the hood of a car and smoking. Dean felt a great, senseless wash of appreciation swell through him. The woman in armor had been a breath of fresh air in the stale crust of solitude that had followed him through Hell—well, until she'd booted him off the island and into the cloud layer—but so inhuman. God, even if they were going to try to kill him, it was still good to see actual people.

He'd been right about Cas in Hell being more _interesting_ than anything a town like this, one that probably had a name like Ride-Em-Cowboys or Curlicue, could offer him, but—he'd been…very alone for a while, he realized. He was surprised and then annoyed at himself for thinking so. He battered down the feeling. _Weakness._ Control it. The Mark surged at his turmoil, and numbness flooded him, sweet and lingering in his throat.

God, he needed to kill something. That would do it, cool him down and flush out all these… _intrusions_.

Well, if he was looking to kill something, he’d come to the right level of Hell. And it was even patterned after his home turf.

Dean cast one last, idle look around for the shadow that had passed outside his door and then set off for town, the sky gleaming sunlessly overhead.

– ✞ –

Dean had been nineteen when _The Truman Show_ had hit theaters. That summer, he'd seen it four times. The Winchester family unit had been sprinting from state to state to squeeze in as much real work as possible before school started and every move would be carried out to the sound of Sam's thunderous sulking from the back seat. All four had been dates, he was pretty sure; it hadn’t been like he was going to _tell_ any given girl that yes, he'd seen it just last week when he'd been on a date with a blonde from Missoula with much nicer pick-up lines, maybe they could go see something else? The girls asked, shyly, with promise in their eyes, and he shut up and dug around in the motel couch cushions for popcorn money. So it went.

It started to get eerie around the third time, when he started picking up the extras drifting across the background even before Truman. He officially caved and made _The Big Lebowski_ his Official Date Movie when he started seeing their wholesome suits and glazed stares in his dreams. The whole premise was _Twilight Zone_ levels of fucked up. But there was something particularly awful about the idea that the people he passed on the street and thought nothing of were watching him, bent their lives over and over to intersect with his so they could watch him, and meanwhile every time for him was the first time.

As Sam got older and taller and surlier and the girls got less likely to demand dinner and a movie before the main event, 1998 faded into the dim haze of memory. Still, every now and then, he found himself on the job and squinting at a victim or a neighbor or a mortician, bracing for the rush of dread that had rocked through him when he'd turned to Dinner and _The Truman Show_ #4 and thought for a moment that she'd looked exactly like Amanda Heckerling from senior year.

This particular Hellscape was like that, but worse, because Dean had the distinct sense that all the extras on this particular set were dead.

He wandered through the town like a tourist. The buildings were less worn than usual for old highway towns, which had mostly just rusted away when the interstate system came down from above, but it still looked like no one had renovated since the 50s. The neon signs of the diner and bar were faded; radio static drifted out of windows that had been left cracked open for the heat, as stubbornly uncommunicative as the TV had been in the motel.

And there was something wrong with the people. They glittered like heat waves, their images shifting unsteadily in the corner of Dean’s eye. The woman leaning back against a dusty tan sedan—dark hair, tight red shirt, something awfully _familiar_ about the way her gaze followed him but maybe it was just that she was _his type_ and he’d picked up a couple dozen women that looked just like her over the years—lit up another cigarette and seemed to waver with the smoke curling up, with the static buzzing from her car radio.

An older kid, dressed too warmly for the weather, dragged his brother away from where he’d been kicking at the old side door of the grocer’s when he saw Dean staring at him, trying to figure out why he kept picturing blood on their faces; his fingers seemed to go _through_ his little brother’s shoulder before he got a good grip on the kid’s striped shirt. A woman almost brushed against him as she hurried into the diner, pale and with sharp, pretty features that made Dean think of being young and scared of death and trying to breathe around the raw pain in his chest. He thought about the silver cross she’d worn as he rubbed the arm that had been nearest to her, which ached and tingled with nerve-deep pain.

He drew in a deep breath that rattled in his lungs, stood on the street and tried to _remember_ —he _knew_ them, knew them all, every person in this town, he caught faces through the dusty windows that made something in him lurch with recognition. But all he could dredge up when he looked at them was a vague awareness of years gone and guilt, guilt rooting him to the pavement and this world of wavering ghosts.

He rubbed the heel of his hands into his eyes and tried not to see their flickering faces on his eyelids. Nearby, a rustling, and then the sound of a kid scampering away.

The squeak of sneakers on pavement.

Dean's eyes flew open and then he was after him, following the sound and the sliver of a blue hoodie that he saw flitting around the corner of the tiny gas station. Around back were a pair of old-fashioned gas pumps and a marquee board that blared "TURN BACK" proudly where the price per gallon usually went. Static drifted from a radio on a sagging porch where a few tires were propped up for seats.

The boy was crouched behind one of the pumps. His features swam like the rest, but Dean could see his gaze fixed in terror—not on Dean but on the station.

"What's in there?" he asked the kid, pitched his voice low and soothing in his old talking-to-victims voice. It came out unevenly; he was out of practice, he thought.

The kid didn't answer, but Dean got his answer anyway when _something_ began to bud out of the shadows of the door, the places where the overhang created pools of shade on the porch. The darkness bulged, took on mass and texture. It poured itself into the shape of a man that lumbered toward Dean and the kid, shadows dripping from him like molasses.

"Ugh," Dean said emphatically. There'd been something weirdly organic about the whole thing, like watching the chest-burster scene from _Alien_. From beside him, he saw the kid begin to shake and didn't blame him at all.

Thankfully, there was nothing familiar about the Creature from the Gas Lagoon.

"Aw, did you come all this way for little ol' me?" he asked. "You _shouldn't_ have." He felt grounded, the appearance of a clearly evil sucking vortex of death enough to put him on familiar ground. No more walking among people he wasn't sure whether he should be remembering or killing again; this was _him,_ what he was meant for, made for. The Blade warmed in his hand.

How long had it been since Crowley had conjured his Southern-Fried Hellgate? A day? A couple? And all that time the Blade hadn't bit into anything that would _satisfy_. Could monsters made of pure shadow and ill intent die? It probably wouldn't hurt to try, he decided.

The thing ignored him and advanced on the boy, who clung to the pipes of the gas pump and shrunk back like if he made himself a small enough target the shadow would lose interest and go away. Dean smiled a bare-tooth grin and moved to intercept.

This _wasn't_ about saving the kid. He didn't do that anymore. Weakness or no weakness, he didn't _do_ that. But he wanted to kill something, and the kid was in the way.

"Blah, blah, pick on someone your own size or whatever," he told it. It kept moving, slouching till it was just six feet away—four—two— “Come on, I actually _want_ to punch you in that big ugly mu—”

Its arm-shape moved, shockingly fast, and Dean threw himself to the side to avoid having his head taken off by the glint of metal in its unformed fist. He kicked out, slammed his heel against its knee, but for all that the shape was still a little see-through, it felt like kicking solid concrete.

Dean gritted his teeth and recalibrated. He rolled to his feet and drove the Blade into where its head flowed into its body, and this time there was a little give before he had to stumble back and regroup. Solid shadow. Not exactly new—there'd been those daevas in Chicago—but still frustrating. But if he put enough force behind his swing—

The wraith ignored him—seriously? he’d almost put a knife in it—and slumped with purpose toward the gas pump.

This was _not about the kid,_ Dean reminded himself sternly.

When he slammed all his weight into the Blade and sank it into the shadow’s back, it felt good anyway.

The Blade trembled in resistance at first but then seemed to realize Dean wasn’t kidding around about this; once he got past the unyielding surface, it went easily, like cutting through smoke. The shade rippled around the Blade before dissolving, shadows sinking back into the ground and wisping up away like the world’s nastiest air pollution. The Mark still buzzed angrily at his elbow, which sucked. Dean was starting to suspect that if he wanted to clear out the noise in his head and in his veins, he might have to wait until he got Cas and got out of there, which was disgusting.

“You okay?” he asked the kid, and kindly did not try to stab him to see whether any of the ghosts around here would work any better. The boy just fixed bug eyes on Dean, the terror in them unchanging.

With a swoop like falling out of the sky, this time Dean recognized him.

“Wait,” he said, more to himself than the kid, but the kid—the _kitsune—_ darted away, threw himself around the other side of the gas pump and hurtled through the gas station door where not long ago a shadow had congealed to stalk and kill him.

Dean didn’t follow. He just watched Jacob Pond, whose mother he'd killed, race out of sight like the devil was on his tail and heartily, thoroughly wanted a drink.

– ✞ –

So he went to the bar.

Even though the sky blazed with light—still no sun, the sky just a uniform stripe of seamless blue—the bar was open, and doing a pretty brisk business. Dean sacked out at a stool at the corner of the bar and watched people he tried not to remember come up and pay for drinks with roughly-hewn coins that were out of place in this town, in this century. Gold and silver, caked with dirt, molding worn away by time and hands.

At the other end of the bar was a girl he thought was Nancy—pretty virgin Nancy, with her rosary and her features flickering. And over by the door was farmhand Ellie, staring into a shot glass with the same glazed, haunted expression she’d had when he’d met her; he couldn’t even remember if she was old enough to drink, if she’d been a teenager yet when she’d sold her soul.

Behind the bar was a big picture window that looked out onto a “playground”—just a rusty set of monkey bars and a tire swing, and someone had turned over a few bags of wood chips onto the dirt. But that was worse than the bar; there was a girl in a hospital gown sitting on top of the bars, and Dean couldn’t look at her, felt the heavy weight of a horseman’s ring on his finger even when he turned away. The kids that had been by the grocery store were back, kicking—a soccer ball? It rippled and wavered, like their features. He knew who they were now but couldn’t remember their names, which was a blunt pain behind his eyes.

The radio mumbled static from beneath the counter, but now Dean could hear fragments of voices in the white noise. Whispers, there and gone. He closed his eyes. A smoky haze had settled over the bar, though no one was smoking, and it still smelled like nothing but underground, and it stung his eyes. Years ago in Ohio, he’d met a demon, and she’d smiled at him and talked religion and damnation before Sam had killed her. A lot had happened since she’d asked him if he was scared to go to Hell. Dean wondered if she’d still be sitting there smoking if he ducked out of the bar and headed back to that sedan parked out on the street.

When he opened his eyes, a woman in a yellow dress was standing out by the playground, watching a Jefferson Starship try to kick a soccer ball through the tire swing, and he knew, instantly, without needing to look, that it was Lisa. And he knew why Hell had chosen _these_ faces.

“Get it now?”

An empty glass clunked down in front of him. He tore his gaze away from the woman by the monkey bars. The bartender was a familiar face, too. Of course. “You’re not dead, though,” he said in mild surprise.

Ann Marie gave him the flirty smile he remembered from the Black Spur. “How do you know? You were just…rolling through.”

He winced at the memory. “Yeah, it wasn’t one of my better lines.”

“You want anything, or you just looking?”

Dean thought wistfully of the coins he’d almost snuck out of Hell: Babylonia Edition. “Can’t pay you.”

“You already are.” She held the glass under a tap that said _El Sol_ ; dust poured from the spout into the glass. “You look…thirsty. You can owe me one.”

“…Thanks,” Dean said. She set the glass of dust in front of him. It glittered unappetizingly in the light from the window. She leaned forward, intimate, like he was the only one she wanted to sell drinks to, and as he watched, a bruise blossomed around her wrist, like spilled ink. He frowned. “You okay?”

“Something’s coming for me.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Night. Shadow,” she said flippantly. Her voice crackled like the static from the radio. “It’s coming for all of us. Except you. You remember my ex?”

“Asshole with anger issues?”

“I’ve got a type,” she told him wryly. “Did you know he was a musician?”

“Yeah,” he said, “we had a nice talk about the best guitarists of all time while I was breaking his fingers. Man had no respect for Plant.”

“He was a genius on the strings. When he played, he could tame all the beasts and birds. They’re just songs themselves. You should remember that.” She sighed, like she hadn’t heard him at all. She had her own glass now, and she was drinking down dust like it was water. “He tried to give it up for me, you know. That’s what he paid. But he started humming when he carried me up…and I stayed. We all have our addictions.”

Dean frowned. He recognized that story. “Eur—?”

“Ann Marie,” she corrected. “Forget me already, Kerouac?”

She brushed her hair away from her face. His eyes followed the movement; bruises slowly darkened onto her neck as he watched. “You’re hurt,” he said more urgently.

“I told you. Someone’s coming for me.”

He rubbed where the Mark was seared onto his skin and smiled. “Picked a bad day for it, then. I put him in traction then, I can do it here.”

“You can’t save me. You can’t save anyone.”

“You can stop ripping lines from my subconscious, that’s copyright infringement.”

“No, Dean. You can’t save _anyone._ ”

He looked at her. At where she was silhouetted against the window, the light turning her edges hazy and unfocused. She looked at him with that expression of mixed patience and a stranger’s affection that tugged at his memory of a few nights like all the others. “You could stay, Dean. You could be my hero, fight off my shadow. Maybe you could take on every shadow here. Save me and every person here. But you can’t save us unless you _stay_. Because if you went, they’d come back for us eventually—they always do.

“But you already know that. Because you figured it out.”

Ellie, Nancy, Layla, Ann Marie. Jefferson Starships and a girl with a heart condition. Dead girls and monster kids and the demon who’d believed. Lisa. And Jacob Pond.

“That’s what you want from me?” he said, not to her—to the false sky and the stifling air and the rest of Hell. This was absurd. He ought to laugh. Instead, he was angry, inexplicably furious, and it raged through him like the Mark on its worst days. “I gave up on the saving people schtick a long time ago, sweetheart.”

“And yet,” she said, “you saved me.”

“It ain’t about your honor. I told you that.”

“I know. We all have our addictions.”

A cut traced its way over Ann Marie’s cheek, like she’d been hit by someone wearing a ring. And from behind her, the shadows cast by the bar started to swell.

“Go. Or stay.” She nodded at the glass full of dust where it sat untouched on the counter. “It’s your choice. Everything Hades asks is always your choice.”

Slowly, stiffly, Dean rose. It was a long time before he could turn his back on the shade of Ann Marie and walk out of the bar.

From the radio, he thought for a moment the static resolved into Sam’s voice curling over his name, but then it was gone, and he was alone.

– ✞ –

He walked back towards the motel. The midday light beat down on the gas station, the restaurant, the old junkers rusting in the street. And as he walked, the radio’s buzz followed him, fragments of news broadcasts and songs he didn’t recognize drifting through the still air to his ears.

_“—causing the massive explosion that ripped apart the police station and claimed the lives of everyone inside. Among the deceased, at least six police officers—”_

When he passed a specter now he could see _something_ dark and hungry and already-victorious resting in their shadows. They didn’t move or grow the way Ann Marie’s shadow had, the way the kitsune kid’s had at the gas station, but they yawned too dark and thick for the light bouncing off of the chrome-gilded architecture into his eyes. A thin older woman in a tank top checking her watch outside the diner—Tara, who the Mark of Cain had killed too, in a roundabout way—had something with black eyes and teeth in hers. The demon smoking against her car had a shadow that gleamed dully like a gun, a gun that could kill anything.

When he blinked, they were just shadows again.

From the car radio, a low, aching love ballad that he didn’t recognize: “ _Pour out pure waters, pour out fine oil / The love of my ages is dead—”_

There was an ache behind his teeth that screamed at him as fiercely as the brand on his arm. He was most of the way to the motel when he saw the kitsune boy again. He was crouched behind the back wheel of a truck, and from out of the desert stalked a solid darkness in the shape of a man. Dean had a sour suspicion that he knew what Jacob Pond had nightmares about.

He kept walking.

This desert was for the dead, or at least the dead to him. And Cas was dead, too. But Dean had decided to overturn the rest of reality to fix _that_ failure. He hadn’t agreed to pay this toll for Ann Marie. Or Lisa. Or Jacob Pond.

There was a wooden block of a radio balanced on the metal rail of the motel stairs when he made it back. This time, it was unmistakably Sam’s voice that stuttered out of the speakers.

“ _—of course he barely told me anything, but I think I figured out the ritual he used anyway…ugh, what did he mean by…I hate cuneiform…but I think this is it, the word he said—and it means ‘offerings,’ like the ones Inanna left by each Gate, but it also means ‘sacrifice’—I think it’s a metaphor—Dean, I think—”_

Dean’s arm swept out and brought the radio crashing to the concrete steps. It shattered, wires and circuit boards spilling out of the wooden casing, the antenna mangled beyond repair. He stepped over the mess to climb the stairs back to the room with a view that Hell had lent to him. He didn’t have a key, but the doorknob turned easily under his hand.

The room was gone. When he opened the door, light swallowed him up and he felt a weight lift from his chest as he turned his back on the town of the ones he couldn’t save.

– ✞ –

This time when he passed through the Gate, he didn't even get to take a breath before something smacked him into a rock.

Nope, into another mook, he realized dazedly as the rock behind him heaved up and tried to stomp his skull into the ground. He rolled away from it and spun the Blade to a slashing position in one smooth motion, feeling the earth shudder as something massive as a boulder punched down where his head had been a moment before.

There were two of them—no, four—huge, blank-faced warriors that had bodies like a couple of rocks roughly belted together. Dean telegraphed a swing at one and used the momentum to carry him down between another two out of the direct line of fire.

His ears were ringing from that first blow, but there was a grin stretched across his face. This was great, this was _fantastic_ —he'd been _aching_ for a fight, fucking gagging for one, and ten-feet-tall mountain men were exactly what he needed to slake that craving—his veins felt lit up with anticipation like his blood was too hot, like at last the ache where the things he'd already handed over to Hell had been was smoking away. "Welcome to the party, pals," he told the Things cheerfully, the taste of blood singing on his tongue.

The nearest one swiped at him, and that was it for the witty banter portion of the fight. That was okay. He'd always liked this part best, anyway.

He got the sense that they were somewhat less than sentient, but they moved to trap him cleverly enough. Two surged around him on either side while he kept himself busy slipping and ducking wildly under Thing #1's punches. He had the Blade, but couldn’t find a good target—they really did look made out of stone, great sea-polished boulders for limbs and torsos and heads. Maybe the crease where the head-boulder met the torso-boulder…maybe through where a heart would be…

The Things were slower but their arms were also the size of literal tree trunks, so getting hit was a _lot_ more painful for Dean than it was for them. A few times they managed to clip him on the meat of his thigh or his shoulder, which hurt like a _bitch_ , but Thing #4 circling around to surprise him and slamming into his ribs hard enough that he could hear them crack was worse. Yowza. Dean put himself between Thing #4 and Thing #2 and staggered out of the way just in time for Thing #2’s pseudo-fist to pound into Thing #4. Not even a dent.

There was a heat he recognized in his ribs and where a stray shot had bruised up his shoulder. He ducked down behind an outcropping of rock to regroup while the Mark worked at his injuries.

There was snow on the rock.

He’d landed on the beach this time. He’d missed bikini season by a few months, though, it looked like—on the other side of his temporary shelter and the Things, the sea rose up in huge, still, ice-tinted swells. A cold, clear light filtered in from overhead, but the sky was the bitter gray of places in the North that were all stormclouds in the winter. He could smell the sea but also the mustiness of cave air.

And in the distance, the Gate.

It jutted out of the sand not half a mile away, extremely out of place in this land of sea and dark sheer cliffs; it was a wall, built from huge sandy bricks, the top edge jagged and crumbling around the doorway cut into the center. It looked like it had been built for another kind of place, with another kind of sand.

And between him and it—Things.

Not just four. Things lined the beach from here to the Gate, some slumped against the cliff face like puppets, some like half-buried boulders in the frozen sand. Asleep, Dean thought. The sand where he’d landed was disturbed, like a few—four—Things had crawled out of it when he’d woken them up.

So it was going to be fighting his way through, then.

 _Finally_. At last, a clear path, no mind games, no _weakness_ , just stabbing. Now this, at last, was Hell.

The Things—golems? he’d met an actual golem before, and all in all he’d been way more normal-looking than these literal rocks—drifted towards him. His ribs still felt a little sore, but he had to move when another massive stone punch cracked into the rock by his head.

The next time Thing #1 smashed at the ground where he'd been, he came up next to its fist and drove the blade in hard enough to crack through its stone skin. It grunted—or made a sound partly grunt and partly ocean waves—and jerked away, leaving a crumbling crack spiraling through its fist.

In his grip, the Blade _sang._

– ✞ –

For nearly a year, every thought he’d had had been, in one way or another, all about the Mark. It’d always been there, gnawing at the edges of his mind; even when he’d been working a case or drinking with Sam or dreaming good dreams, it itched under his skin and somewhere deeper, harder to reach. If he went too long between kills, it started to hurt. And then it started to _ache._

There was a consciousness to it; it was a presence just aware enough to know when blood was near. In the middle of a fight, like now, the Mark _quickened._ He could feel it, the _hunger_ of it, and it drove him wilder, made his hits harder. But that itch still nagged under his skin, set him on a hair-trigger, made his senses burn until his clothes chafed his skin and the light spiked into him like a hammer, and it wouldn’t stop until he killed something—and then the absence of pain was like religion, like orgasm, like falling in love. In Hell he’d been a torturer; as a demon he was all about the happy ending.

So wrestling with the Things—like everything in this sorry excuse for a Hell—started to get real frustrating _real fast._ The Blade worked on them, sort of, but they _wouldn’t fucking die._ Just like the Mark burned champagne and bubbles through him to heal him, there was _something_ , something pulsing red and hot, that was fixing the Things, too, and faster than he could scratch them.

When he’d seen the gouge he’d put into Thing #1’s arm-club sealing up with molten heat, that had been bad. When he’d let Thing #3 toss him into Thing #4 to turn his flight path into momentum and the groove nearly sealed up around the Blade, that was forty times worse.

But, he thought grimly as either Thing #2 or Thing #4 slammed a limb into his torso and swept him to the sand, he could chip away at them. He was a persistent fucker—just ask Satan, or Crowley, or Sam. He could probably find a way to kill them eventually.

But God if the Mark wasn’t going to be _annoying_ about it until he got there.

He cut them (with great difficulty), got them to punch each other with earthshaking force, tripped them over rocks and smashed them into cliff faces. Nothing; if anything worked, it healed immediately. Maybe he’d underestimated very extremely slightly how cool it would be to fight indefatigable, unkillable warriors. In the vague way he’d imagined Angel Hell, all of the unkillable warriors had been…well, like angels: killable.

And he was starting to slow. He took more blows than were…ideal, sharp bursts of pain whenever he left himself open or paused to clear out another concussion. When a Thing grasped hold of his calf and swung him like a soft toy into the rock cliffs behind him, it was only downhill from there. His ankle hurt, his collarbone felt broken, a cold wind sliced into him like the Things needed any help, and maybe— _maybe—_ it was time to try cunning.

Dean ducked his head and ran. He missed a low strike aimed at his knee by sheer chance and zigzagged a few inconveniently placed limbs. Sand and ice crunched beneath his boots as he forlornly wished he’d worn footwear with less traction so he could just home run-slide through the outstretched arms of Things #3 and #4. If he ever got out of here, he’d write a travel book. _What to wear while infiltrating Angel Hell._ He vaulted over the arm barring his way and settled back into a stride that would put an Olympic hurdler to shame, if he did say so himself.

Past the Things now. The sky churned darkly overhead. And then he was on the ice.

The water had frozen so clear and pure he could see coral jutting up beneath him, colored bone-white through the ice. Dean teetered on the gentle ridges he could feel under his feet where the ice had frozen in wavelets, but he scooted out farther. For a moment, he thought the Things had more sense than to follow, but he was barely a few yards out when the first Thing set its massive leg down on the ice. He braced for a crack but nothing happened; the ice was too thick to falter under their weight.

The Things moved smoothly across the frozen surface of the ocean, which seemed deeply unfair to Dean. They spread out to corral him fifty yards from shore, and he let them.

Closer—closer—

Thing #4 got close enough to punch at his head. Dean threw himself out of the way, and its rock-fist punched with enough force—force Dean had gotten very well acquainted with—to split the ice under him.

And that was his cue. Dean scrambled for shore as water exploded up behind him, swallowing up Thing #3 and Thing #4 as the ice burst under them. He angled himself under Thing #1’s arm-boulders as he went, and it swiped after him—smart enough to surround him, but not to avoid _punching through the ice it was standing on_ —and went down, too. Dean caught a glimpse of the rough features that had been carved into Thing #2’s face, the only part of the Things that weren’t smooth stone, before it disappeared under the waters of the fucking frozen lake of Hell as well. It took just enough time for it to go under for him to wave sweetly in its direction.

Ten yards away from shore now, and the ice had stopped cracking. He stopped to pant a few ragged breaths that he didn’t need but which felt nice anyway. Without the sound of living statues trying to kill him, the only noise on the beach was the cold whine of wind and disturbed water. He rubbed where the Mark stung and burned on his skin and wished with a surprising amount of weariness that the Things would just _drown_ already.

And then stone punched up through the ice.

 _Shock_ wasn’t a strong enough word to describe what it felt like to be dunked in the frozen ocean. It was more like that time years ago when he’d nearly been electrocuted to death and Sam had gotten him into an unsavory mess with a faith healer and a reaper; pain barreled through him and purged every thought from his mind, the _breath_ froze in his lungs. Helpfully, a Thing was there to smack it out of him.

An explosion of bubbles in front of his face. Dean surged wildly for where he thought the surface was, but a _fucking Thing_ landed another blow on his jaw and one more on his shin and he wasn’t sure which one sent him spinning, spinning—

Water in his lungs—

But he didn’t need to breathe—

His head pounded like parade drums—maybe he’d gotten hit there, too—and he struck out furiously. And then light, and air.

Every part of him hurt, so he wasn’t sure how he managed to haul himself out of the FUCKING FROZEN LAKE OF HELL—he was so cold it barely made a difference—he lay there hazily, only a bit away from the shore but still trying to process the sight of four massive bulges of rock dragging themselves up out of the deep.

It had been a long, long time since he’d been afraid that he was going to lose a fight.

There had been plenty of moments—on a hunt, on the longer series of carnival acts that was his life—when he’d realized that this might be it for him. Before he’d gotten familiar enough with getting his ass beat to tell whether someone was just punching him into unconsciousness or actually going for the throat; Lucifer’s fist in his face, Cas telling him to _bow;_ that terror, still unmatched by any other, when he’d realized that Sam and Ruby _weren’t_ going to pull a rabbit out of a hat for him, that the bay of Hellhounds on the horizon was all that was left.

This was different—it curled up in him, cold instead of the warm bile-taste of fear at the back of his mouth. Apocalypse-buster, Knight of Hell, professional pain in the ass of evil. And he wasn’t going to make it. Not with every brush with a stone giant turning into an exchange of blows that lasted hours. Not when they healed as fast as he did and hit harder.

There was no way to win this fight. He understood that as a man well-versed in unwinnable fights. He couldn’t kill them.

But if he stopped trying, he might get through the Gate.

His eyes fell on where he couldn’t feel his hands trembling on the ice. He stared at the jawbone in his right hand and realized slowly that after that whole horror show, he still hadn’t let go of the Blade.

By his ear, the heavy tread of a Thing. He lurched to his feet, shoved the Blade in his waistband, and ran.

The Gate was a five-minute sprint at normal speed, but Dean couldn’t feel his legs, or his body, or his brain. He took at least one heavy blow to the shoulder and one to the ribs before he was grasping at frozen sand instead of ice, and then he was running flat-out but the Things were after him, and other Things were stirring under the sand.

He kept falling, or maybe he kept being knocked to the ground under heavy, shattering blows. Bursts of pain flowered in his shoulderblade, his hip, his calf, but the world was starting to blur and he couldn’t keep track of where the Things had hit him and where he could feel ice water still digging into his nerves. And the wind didn’t sound like wind anymore, it sounded like screaming, and the air was thick and still and sulfurous on his tongue—

And Hell swallowed him up without warning. Not this Hell.

He was on the rack again, or off of it, which had hurt more in the beginning, a marrow-deep sick pain, and he was burning, his whole arm was on fire and blackening in the heat, and he was screaming, screaming—

No. The pale glare above him was the sky, not a set of white eyes. He spat sand out of his mouth and yanked himself up, pain splintering through him, more all the time, like someone had taken a sledgehammer to every bone in his body, and he remembered that too, his bruises throbbed like someone had pulled his skin back to roll the meat of his limbs between their fingers—

 _—Tenderizing_ , Alistair had said, and he’d lovingly explained his technique for stripping skin from muscle so that Dean could try it out on some other sinner later, when he gave in, and he would give in—look at your meat, that’s all you are, meat—let’s start with the fingers—

But it was his elbow that shot agony through his spine, his brain. The Mark screamed at him and he had a feeling that at this point even his death would feel better than this _thirst_ —

—and worst of all, pleasure. Pleasure to watch someone else burn, to watch someone else scream, that terrific, orgasmic lack of pain. Sometimes Alistair made it look like Sam or Dad or Mom whose tibia he was splinting open, whose lips he was peeling off, sometimes he believed it and begged them to understand that they had to do this for him, please, please, he couldn’t take it anymore—and if he just _killed something_ this would all _stop_ —

But that had been Hell. And he’d gotten out.

Cas had pulled him out.

Dean dragged himself upright, things shifting in his knees and hips and ribs that shouldn’t be moving, bone fragments grinding against each other. Just a few feet away now, if he could drag the soupy mess of his meatsack through. He remembered thinking, decades ago, that the Mark could probably put the pulp of him back together. Like Alistair had. Like Cas had.

Something lifted from around his stomach, but that might have just be the spinal damage talking. He let the pain shutter over his eyes as he surged through the Gate.

– ✞ –

Sand. In his mouth.

Also: blood.

Dean squinted around the gross eye crust that apparently his demon body still produced when he was blacked out from pain. A groan wrenched out of him. Still no sun. Still Hell. But the sky was an eye-watering shade of blue that knifed seven-tequila-shots-hangover pain into his eyes. He scrunched up his eyes again and tried to determine whether the shooting pain down all his limbs was healing mojo or a broken neck.

“You look,” said an extremely familiar, unpleasant, _and impossible_ voice, “like Hell.”

“Oh God,” Dean snarled, “if you’re the next way this fucking goddess is gonna try to kill me, just get it over with.” He squeezed his eyes open in defiance of the throbbing in his head to give the Crowley-shaped shadow hovering above him the full effect of his glare.

“And to think, I was concerned Hell might be a poor influence on you,” Crowley sneered. “It’s me. The real _six-shooter_.”

In spite of himself, Dean believed him; not even gods could mimic that particular how-does-someone-with-a-brain-the-size-of-yours-manage-to-thwart-all-my-plans-and-constantly-threaten-my-throne tone. “And _what_ are you doing here?”

“I’m nursing you back to health, arsehole. Sit up.”

“Does it look like I can move my spine right now?”

In response, Crowley— _flicked water at him._

Dean sputtered. He was still drenched in chill seawater—he’d started to air out in the heat since it looked like for this act, Hell had swung back to “desert wasteland” for inspiration—but that didn’t mean he appreciated all the _Crowley_. But the water was weirdly warm on his skin, and after a moment, he actually felt solid enough to try pushing himself into an upright position. “God, who’s your dealer?”

“It’s the life-giving waters, you imbecile. Pick up a scroll sometime. And that’s all you’re getting; I would’ve just left you here to prune if the _gala-tura_ didn’t get impatient about this kind of thing.”

“The what? Wait,” he said, and paused until he’d gathered enough strength to reach up and use Crowley’s tie to yank him down to the sand. Pulling the Blade from the small of his back was as smooth a motion as ever, as was using the hilt to choke off Crowley’s highly offended cry. “Go back to the part where you took the back door into _God’s uncrackable safe_ after _you_ told me the only way through was the Cirque du Death Trap.”

“I’m the King, aren’t I? I can get anywhere in Hell, even into your nasty little head. And before you ask,” he added, sounding Johnny Walker Red levels of affronted, “I can’t just _zap you to the end._ Can’t, not won’t.”

_“Why fucking not?”_

_“_ You don’t have the security clearance,” Crowley said primly.

Dean let his eyes fall closed and watched his headache move behind his eyelids. Getting mostly beaten to second death. Hell flashbacks for the first time in years. Cities of the lost. _Unnatural trees._ He let Crowley’s tie go out of exhaustion more than anything else.

Crowley dragged his hands over his suit in a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to get some of the sand off. “Believe me, if I could bring people along, I’d have someone handing me a suit you haven’t soiled with your… _Winchesterness_ at this moment. When we ran together I had a whole task force to deal with your miasma of stains.”

“Well, welcome to Hell,” Dean mumbled into the sand.

Of all the things he’d wanted to get back to when he clawed his way out of this circus, exchanging snappy one-liners with Crowley had not been very high on the list. But Crowley didn’t immediately brandish a witty retort, and the unexpected pause made something in Dean falter. He cracked an eye open and peered up at where Crowley was giving him a strangely reserved look. “What,” Dean sniped, “do I have something on my broken nose?”

“…Trick of the light, that’s all. For a moment there, you seemed very…human.”

“Well, I’ve had a friggin’ day.” He breathed in, and the musty thickness of the air recalled the smell of another part of Hell entirely. His vision swam briefly with red and the distorted faces of the damned before he blinked them back and shoved it away. How extremely old pathetic Dean of him. But in spite of the bruises and cuts and broken bones taking their sweet time to knit themselves back together, he wasn’t, in fact, human. “No worries, Florence Nightingale. My magic tattoo’ll take care of it in no time.”

“Doesn’t look like it’s in much of a hurry about it.” That was true—Dean could feel the Mark fitting tendons and joints back together, but it was more of a dull warmth creeping over him than that familiar searing heat in his blood. Crowley shook his head, incredulous. “Have you really not noticed?”

“Even if I have, I can tell you’re dying to explain it to me anyway.”

“You’ve been losing bits of yourself all over the place, Dean-o. You have been since you took your first breath of Hell, and you will be until you take your first breath away from it.” His voice turned intent and serious; oh, so this was a _warning_. “You might not be able to get it back. You can pour out pure waters, pour out fine oil, but those parts of you are too gone to slap a bandage on.” And under that, hanging between them, Dean could hear the place where Crowley didn’t ask, _So why do you even care?_

And under _that,_ the sinking knowledge settling in Dean that Crowley had known. He’d known from the beginning what this _ritual_ was about. What Hell would ask of him—what it always asked of him.

Huh. He ought to be used to the chill of realizing that Crowley hadn’t been completely forthcoming on something important by now. He looked away at the plains of white sand around them, at the pale ruins that peeked shyly from a desert that had mostly buried them, at the clear blue sky stretching above unbroken by clouds or sun. “You don’t have to worry about me, Crowley,” he said mildly. “You don’t have to do that at all.”

Crowley glanced away. “Only protecting my investment, sweetheart. Do you know the contacts I had to burn through to get this—” he gestured expansively— “scrap of a fragment of spellwork? There aren’t many followers of gods so forgotten they’ve turned to dust out there. You ought to be thanking me, not shunning me.”

“Thanks,” Dean said and even meant it. “Jerk.”

Crowley flinched, took two quick steps back like Dean had given him an actual blow.

“Squirrel,” he said, and blinked out like that hadn’t been a goodbye.

Behind where Crowley had been standing, a squat, low building rose out of the sand, the only structure in miles that wasn’t mostly buried. At least Hell was being obvious with its hints now.

Dean dragged himself upright and started out over the desert.

– ✞ –

As he trudged over the sand towards the temple, he passed by the fragments of a long-dead town poking out of the sand like gravestones. Just enough of the ruins were visible that he could see the outlines of buildings, or where buildings used to be; some had crumbled away so that only a single wall was left standing, some were mostly intact, the top two or three feet of the roof slanting up between dunes. The sand spilled over empty windowsills and lapped at the tops of walls more like a flood than a desert. Dean couldn’t shake the sense that he was walking over the grave of an entire city.

And it was _hot._

They were really going all out with the special effects now. It wasn’t a very long walk but his clothes dried until they hung off of him like a stiff crust. He abandoned his work shirt for the t-shirt underneath when he started to sweat, the sky glinting an unforgiving blue above him.

Technically, sweating was something else that he shouldn’t have needed to do, but Crowley…had been onto something when he’d pointed out that the Mark of Cain was falling behind his ever-accumulating injuries. He’d taken the Mark as a means to an end, but killing, dying, resurrection—the Mark had worked at him, dulled the mess of _feeling_ that had always been roiling around in him, made him strong, made him _fearless_ , punched through the nightmares, and all of that had started seeming sweet, not bitter.

Since coming here, it had become harder, like this place was stripping away his skin one layer at a time to get to insides he hadn’t realized were inflamed and raw. The Mark no longer had the power to completely stop him from _feeling_ things, like the heat. Or the Hell flashbacks.

Maybe he’d finally busted his body to the point where even the primeval murder magic needed a rest. Maybe it was pissed at him for having gone—how long now?—without killing _anything._ Those were both perfectly reasonable explanations that were as probable as anything when it came to inexplicable primeval murder magic.

Or maybe it was something else. Something about him.

The sand was the same color as the stone from which the buildings had been built. Dean was suddenly struck with the disproportionately disturbing thought that maybe he wasn’t walking _on_ a grave; maybe he was walking _in_ one.

When he crested the last big dune before the Gate, he had to stop and make sure that he actually was seeing the Gate and that the heat hadn’t cooked his brain into summoning up a mirage.

Where all the once-buildings he’d passed had been made out of stone, this one was definitely concrete. It was a spare little rectangle of a building with the kind of glass door at doctors’ offices or semi-reputable businesses and a window with blinds drawn on either side. There was a stretch of sidewalk in front of it, like a tornado had actually picked up a school administration building from, literally, Kansas and dumped it in Hell.

A sign hung over the door. In bland school administrator font, it read:

WELCOME TO ETERNAL IMPRISONMENT IN THE PROMISED LAND

and then, smaller:

(OR: THE ROAD WHENCE THERE IS NO TURNING)

and even smaller:

(OR: THE WATERS OF LIFE)

and at last, penned in at the bottom:

WE ARE CLOSED, PLEASE COME BACK TOMORROW

“Literally like hell,” Dean said, outraged, before he shoved the door open.

Inside the building was a blank room with only a receptionist's desk to keep the scuffed linoleum and bare plaster walls company. Fluorescent strip lighting gleamed as starkly as the facsimile of desert sunlight outside. Behind the desk was a small, rough sculpture of a square-faced woman balancing an owl in each hand and a lion by each foot, and a woman in an impossible dress boredly fiddling with a desk toy.

A familiar woman.

She had the same angular features as the bitch in blue armor who'd kicked him off of a dead city in the sky, the same smooth dark skin, the same way of just existing that conveyed to Dean how little she cared about anything about him. Her hair was shaved military-regulation short and she was wearing—something—that shifted impossibly with the light, but that was all. They were more identical than twins, than clones.

"We're closed," she said. Her voice was different too, sweet and clear and totally disinterested. She didn't even look up from the little windmill she was spinning; next to it rested a—staff, or a scepter or something—cast from gold and the same blue stone in her Xerox’s mace.

"You're an administrative office in Hell," Dean said. "Does time even really pass here?"

"No. Come back tomorrow."

"Wow, your customer service is somehow worse than the rocks that tried to beat me to death. Not exaggerating at all."

She heaved a sigh and finally dropped the underpaid government wage slave act to look at him. That was another strange thing in a familiar face: her eyes were the same dull gold as the statue. "If you keep other people waiting, Dean Winchester, they oft keep you waiting yourself."

"Okay, I get it, I'm sorry I didn't drag myself across the desert with my whole two functional organs," he groused. He leveled a pointed look at the places where bleach had stained the linoleum. “Ain’t your best location work, anyway. What’s this supposed to be, Paperwork Hell?”

“It’s a temple.”

A temple with rolling chairs. Right. “Yeah? For what?”

She gave him a look of such blazing disdain that Dean thought his eyebrows felt singed. “ _God._ ”

The Blade throbbed where it was pressed against the small of his back, but he thought wearily that, like with her face-twin, whipping it out would probably do more harm than good. “Right,” he said. “Right, that makes sense.” And with more charm: "Hey, you got a sister or something? You look real familiar."

The woman’s mouth bent in something prouder and bitterer than a smile. Her dress, an explosive tapestry of embroidered desert birds and plants, shimmered, and he realized what had been _wrong_ about it: the sagegrass and brush stitched onto her skirt were actually swaying in an impossible breeze.

“Do I look like a human woman to you? I am neither. I am—” and he didn’t understand what came next, a cluster of sounds that might have been the word that Crowley had taken with him, _g_ -something— “and I sprang from the fingertips of God, as did my _sister_ , for only one purpose: I led the Queen of Heaven up to life from where she lay dead in trade for love, her very self for someone’s life.”

A memory: elm trees, a dead woman twisted out of bark, Crowley saying something about archeology and regret. “I thought,” he said, “that was the wrong version of the story.”

“So? Mortals lie and then lie about lying. It’s amazing you get anything _right_ at all. How did it feel to offer truth, Dean Winchester?”

"Dizzying. You're not gonna punt me 30,000 feet out of the air, are you?"

"We'll see how it goes," she said unsmilingly.

Dean gave up on charm. On the desk, the little windmill spun slowly, shifting light over the statue’s blank eyes. “I get it, you’re in control here, I’m outmatched. Fine. Okay. So what do you want from me this time? My tax returns? The next forty years filling out a reimbursement request?”

“Just your word.”

“Yeah, well, lucky you. I got lots of those. My word on what?”

“That,” she said, “if I ask it from you, you’ll leave. Right now. Return to living, or whatever passes for life for those like you, and never try to return, this way or any other.”

Laughter cracked out of his throat. “No.”

“That’s what the Gate will cost you.”

“Screw that. The only reason I’m down here at all is for what’s at the end.” Cas dead, Cas in Hell. Dean leveled out his voice and said, “You’re gonna make me pay to pass? Fine. Ask for something else.”

She cocked her head at him, and the raven threaded where her dress draped over her shoulder mirrored the motion with a shift of its wings. “Nothing else will raise the Gate for you. You won’t make this little promise? Put your quest in my hands, and accept what I decide; whatever I decide.”

He reached back and pulled out the Blade. Even now he couldn’t shake a baffling sureness that he wasn’t going to use it. “Ask for something else.”

She didn’t even bother to look even a little concerned that Dean had just pulled a weapon on her. She picked at a scuff in the desk with a fingernail lacquered with the same constellation of browns and yellows and blues as her breathing, moving dress. “Do you still not get how you walk the road whence there is no turning?” she asked, sounding more like she’d finally taken pity on Dean than anything else. “Why do you think gods feed on parts of humans? It is not for the flavor.”

What? “Because they’re parasites and monsters?”

“Because,” she said, “it’s an _offering_. The Divine asks that for true worship, you give up all of yourself. Flesh and spirit. That’s the price. That’s what faith is worth. Only what you resist to give up has value. And there are other things I could ask; I could demand that you return here, to serve God, the next time you meet a mortal end. Maybe God favors you, or maybe I like you, that I ask so little now.

“Your word that whether you go on or go back is up to me, not you. Control over the end of your journey. And _acceptance,_ that if I tell you to go, you’ll go and let it be. No do-overs, no searching for another way in. It's barely an offering at all, Dean Winchester. It's a favor.”

Dean closed his eyes. “A favor?”

“You can’t control everything, Dean. You’d better learn that now, not later.”

“I do know that,” he snapped.

“But you think it’s your place to challenge the only true law of the universe anyway.”

He licked his lips and tried not to let her know how his heart was tumbling in his chest. The heat was smothering. No air conditioner in Hell, he thought, and longed for water. “Ask for something else.”

“If you won’t pay,” she said, “then we’re closed for today. You can come back tomorrow and try again.”

She was already playing with the windmill again. Dean tightened his fingers on the leather grip of the Blade—if he was going to rush her, now was the time—but didn’t think he could move.

He stood in that reception area built over the grave of a whole city, and thought that in theory she was right. He had a chance at getting through if he gave her what she wanted, and it wasn’t like Hell couldn’t swoop down and kill him—well, he was already dead, so trap him forever—whenever it wanted. Hell, that last Gate had almost finished him off. He’d known it was risky when he’d gone through the door Crowley had opened, and that was why it had been interesting; so little was risky to him anymore. And he’d been right that going after Cas would at least be a challenge.

But— _Cas._

Imagining getting sent home on some dusty old myth's whim and… _accepting it_ burned like he'd choked on a hot coal. The thought of giving up on Cas sparked at a hard knot of rage inside him, not the freezing fury of the Mark but something purer, a warming kind of anger that had been missing from his blood for a long time, the kind that caused things like twenty-year-long blood vendettas or ill-advised demon deals to fix his fuck-ups. As Hell had rubbed him raw, he'd stopped thinking about why he'd come here, pushed it down with the other weakness. It surprised him now to think of Cas dead and pulse with out-of-control anger—and something else, something he’d forgotten.

He thought of Cas there with him. Cas standing in front of him, with the light slanting in through the blinds falling over his face, waiting for Dean to give the lady her answer—or, no, Cas at his shoulder, a tangible cool presence where his grace fucked with his body temperature. Nice for the desert, at least. Cas saying gravely, _"Don't—”_

Don't what? Don't try to kill her (probably), don't agree, don't refuse? _Dean, what are you doing,_ with his familiar scrunched expression of disapproval, or _Dean, where are you,_ like a cry wrenched out of him? Cas who gave the most level-headed advice and whom Dean never listened to, Cas who never listened to Dean, Cas who was probably the angel of poor impulse control and reckless decisions, Cas who had a bad habit of staying behind in postmortem Hellscapes; Cas who worried about him like it was his job and Cas who came to Dean when he needed help even in the bad times and Cas who'd probably been BFFs with Inanna and knew the whole sordid story there, and Dean was forgetting his voice, how hearing his smoker's rasp was a reassurance he could feel in his bones, in his gut—

 _"Dean,"_ he would say, _"you could go back. You should go back."_

 _"Dean,"_ he would say, _"go home."_

Home—bars where the taps ran with beer instead of sand—air that didn't taste like underground and bad memories—maybe working for Crowley to get his fix, maybe hunting again, and either way the blissful rush of nothing that would crash through him the moment he drew the Blade over someone's throat, he could stop this, he could stop _feeling_ like this—

But. He'd already chosen to give all of that up. In bits and pieces, and for Cas.

He still would.

"Is there, like, a path, or would I have to have to bushwhack my way back topside Indy-style,” he said wearily.

She arched an eyebrow at him. “That would be amusing, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s definitely the word I would’ve gone with.” Resigned, he tucked the Blade back into his jeans, let his fingers pause for a moment on the haft. He said, “ _Are_ you going to tell me to go back?”

“You’ll just have to find out yourself, won’t you?”

He closed his eyes. “What do you want me to say again?”

“Control,” she said, melodious and merciless, like the desert wind. “Acceptance.”

“If you tell me to go, I’ll go. Won’t complain, won’t come back. I…accept that.” She drank him in with her eyes, as gold as the statue’s; Dean thought dryly that this was probably the first time he hadn’t had to share her attention with that fucking windmill. “I swear. I get that.”

Nothing changed; no thunderclap, no ecstatic vision. She turned away, and stuck her hand in one of the desk drawers, all bored secretary again. “That was dramatic. Come here.”

“I was serious about the dropping me out of midair thing. By the way.”

She rolled her eyes. “Come _here_. Relax, I’m not going to punish you for your impertinence.”

Dean frowned—honestly, considering most of his interactions with pagan gods involved him trying to kill them, he thought this had gone pretty well, respect-wise—but moved closer. From the other side of the desk, he could see the full impossible sweep of her skirt—the bare patches of bush around her ankles trembling, sand shifting over itself, the desert rats and sand cats and oryxes embroidered on her bodice.

From the drawer, she drew out an incense holder, one of those kitschy desk ones that looked like a man fishing, and a cheap lighter. Actually, he realized as he squinted at it, it looked like _his_ cheap lighter, the one that had bravely sacrificed itself in the struggle against the murderous trees. “Hey—”

“Give me your hand,” she said. She lit the incense. A pungent, perfumed haze lifted up to fill the room; it turned the lights overhead into dull blotches of brightness.

“You gonna tell me what you’re gonna do with that shiny new control you got over me?” he grumbled. He felt wrung out like he’d spent three hours digging up a grave or going toe-to-toe with a Thing. The heat, he thought, and also melodrama gave him indigestion.

"Hush. I just want the rock on your finger. Where you’re going, there’s a no-ring policy."

Dean opened his mouth to protest—all of that, but his limbs had gotten heavy, too heavy to push her away when her slender fingers took his hand and moved like they were slipping a ring off. And he felt it, the release of pressure and weight—

She let go and he staggered; his knees hit the cheap tile hard enough to rattle through his jaw and brain. The incense—ugh, how did he fall for that—

And he hadn’t been wearing a ring—

He stared at the smoke-veiled lights above and for a moment, they looked like a hundred blazing suns. But he was very tired, so he let the thought go as the woman, the office, the desert all dissolved into black. He slept.

– ✞ –

When he opened his eyes, he was in the bunker.

– ✞ – ✞ – ✞ –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jimi Hendrix is the holy forefather of Dean’s musical idols. Kind of a sleaze in his personal life, though, which is why Dean is kind of expecting him to be in Hell.


	3. Orpheus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are love but concrit is a warm fluffy freshly-iced slice of strawberry shortcake on a cold day.

– ✞ – ✞ – ✞ –

It took a while for Dean to be able to drag himself out of his bed and down the hall. Sleep still hung over him, keeping his fingers clumsy and his throat sore and dry. He frowned at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, wondering why he’d expected himself to look different, wondering why he’d expected dust on his knick-knacks.

He’d been dreaming…one of those plotty, intricate dreams where it was almost a shame when they slipped away on waking. Crowley, not even giving Dean a break from him in his sleep, and a desert, and Hell.

And he’d been looking for Cas.

In the kitchen, just a thin sludge of cold coffee was left at the bottom of the percolator. Dean scowled and started a new pot. It wasn’t often that he regretted not sitting down and doing kitchen etiquette drills with Sam when they were kids, but every now and then the kid showed off how they’d been raised in motel rooms, squatter apartments, and sometimes literally barns. He stuck his head into the library where Sam was hunched over his customary place at one of the long tables.

“Dude,” he said, “save me some or clean the pot. It ain’t Constitutional law.”

“No coffee if you don’t get up before noon. I read this thing about training your pets, and it said you should _establish incentives for sticking to a firm routine—_ ”

“Screw you,” Dean griped. “Shit. It’s really that late?”

Sam pointed at the nearest wall clock with his uninjured hand and Dean squinted until the numbers stopped swimming. Almost three. Jesus. He drifted over to look at whatever was on Sam’s laptop that had captivated him so thoroughly he had yet to look away, but all he could make out was a mess of lines and angles. “That for a case?”

“I found it etched under one of the faucets in the second bathroom. Trying to figure out if it’s just, like, ‘Magnus was here’ graffiti or if it’s part of the mystery of where our water comes from. Which,” he added, finally turning to take Dean in, “you should help out with by exploring the shower room. Extensively.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Sammy,” Dean said, outraged.

“I’m just saying, it smells like it’s been a while. Did you sleep in those clothes?”

“Yeah, when you have to fight off demon housebreakers in your sweats, we’ll see who’s laughing!” Sam rolled his eyes and Dean found himself looking at his dumb wrinkled nose and his dumb _okay, Dean_ smirk and realizing that he’d missed him. His dumb little brother who always knew exactly what to say to turn a great day into an irritating one, who needed someone to smack him when he did something stupid and self-sacrificing again, and Dean had _missed_ him.

But he couldn’t remember where he’d been that wasn’t _here_ , like he couldn’t remember why he’d been faintly surprised that Sam looked good, looked normal, or why it had taken a moment to recognize himself in the mirror, or why in the second that he’d realized he’d woken up in the bunker it felt like his heart had plummeted down to his feet. Or why his thoughts caught every time he looked at the bare skin of his right forearm. It nagged at him for a moment and then slipped out of his grasp like a dream, or fine-grained sand. He stared at the pair of coffee mugs at Sam’s elbow, one drained, one full like whoever had been drinking from it had been sipping out of politeness instead of a genuine coffee craving, and asked, “Hey, you seen Cas?”

“Try the archive rooms. I think he got bored of watching me beat my head against our plumbing.”

“Wow. Bored the man whose idea of a wild afternoon is watching paint dry. Nice job, Sam.”

But Sam wasn’t even listening anymore, mostly talking to himself in a room that just Dean happened to also be standing in: “You know, I think the pipes might be laid out in a rune of some kind…here, I think it’s got summoning qualities, which is why we can’t figure out where the pump is…but there has to be somewhere nearby that the guys who built this place could trust to still have clean water in, like, a hundred years—maybe a ground aquifer? I need watershed maps—”

“Hey, I’m not judging, but keep your kinks to yourself.”

Something about Sam— _fritzed_ —then, like static over a bad signal, and for a moment Sam was exactly how Dean remembered him, thin and stretched-looking like he hadn’t slept in a year. If he looked bad, he sounded worse; his voice lurched and crackled along, potholes on a road, or maybe just more interference— “ _—again and again, ‘The currency of Irkalla is sentiment, not gold.’ It shows up in these texts about Assyrian Ishtar, about Sumerian Inanna, and later, all over the world—places that have never heard of these gods—can you hear this, Dean? Crowley said—anyway, this is important—_ the currency of the Underworld is sentiment, not gold—”

“Yeah, keep at it, Mr. Fix-it,” Dean said cheerfully and wandered off with Sam flickering in and out behind him, muttering to himself about water purity indexes and Mesopotamian burial rituals in turns.

Cas wasn’t in the war room, or hanging around the living quarters, but there were signs of his presence everywhere: a book that had been gently opened so the spine wouldn’t crack but not re-shelved, a tan coat hanging on the back of a chair. In the past couple of years, he’d come to appreciate the value that material objects could have, but he sailed right over the many meticulous systems that humans, with their limited memories and patience, had developed to always know where they could find their stuff. Sam had finally given up on trying to teach him the Winchester Decimal System (books sorted by nastiness of critter, then by usefulness) when he’d found Cas’s toothbrush in the microwave one morning. 

But that had been forever ago—the only nights Cas had stayed with them, when they’d been trying to close Hell—they hadn’t even had the bunker for that long yet…

Dean drifted down to the archive rooms, a rabbit warren of storerooms and shelving units overflowing with curse boxes, mythic weapons, and biological specimens that he and Sam had slowly been going through when they weren’t dying, possessed, or fighting a bigger fish. Here too were little traces of Cas. Scuff marks in the dust that looked like they’d been made by a dress shoe, not the durable work boots he and Sam favored; labels lightly corrected in Cas’s neat, slanting handwriting. Cas felt about history texts the way Dean felt about cop procedurals and was compelled to nitpick in the same way.

 _c. 255 CE,_ he’d written on a peeling yellow date label for a dull green amulet, and below that, _(Not actually blessed—unusually large shipment of jade that year resulted in abundance of fake protection charms.)_ A few crates over, he’d penciled in, _Selkie skin withers upon death of the owner, this is a cleverly preserved seal hide._ Dean followed the notes like breadcrumbs, watching in amusement as Cas’s handwriting got spikier and more cramped as he’d gotten huffier.

Beneath unfamiliar weapons and cursed jewelry and boxed-up artifacts labeled with only coy redirections to a particular file, Cas had written things like, _Main export of Songhai was gold, NOT jewels,_ and, _NOT the stone God used to fell Tower of Babylon. This is just a rock. Tower of Babylon not divine intervention. How many times does it need to be said?,_ and once, for an item description Dean could only assume was particularly bullshit, just, _???._ Dean was smirking at a particularly exasperated-looking _That is not how you conduct a fertility rite_ when one of the curse boxes in Storeroom 6 rattled ominously at him.

And _that_ was why they hadn’t finished cleaning out the archives yet. Sometimes the protective charms on curse boxes faded; sometimes the cursed objects they contained were just that strong. One of these days they were planning on getting a witch in to renew those spells that had been left sitting for a few decades. That day had not yet come.

The box shuddered again. Fully aware that in no universe would the smart decision here involve opening the moving curse box, Dean—like everyone else with more curiosity than self-preservation instinct would have done, including, he thought, both Sam and Cas—peeked into the box.

A rope shot out of the crack he’d opened and wrapped around his neck.

Even though the cord around his neck was so tight he didn’t have the air to cry out, he had to roll his eyes. It was a curse box—the hell had he expected? The rope jerked him forward until he slammed bodily into the shelf hard enough to knock the box and twelve other priceless and possibly deadly historical artifacts to the floor.

The rest of the rope turned out to be wound around a rod, as Dean discovered when it rolled smugly out of its poorly-warded prison. Great. Awesome. Now he was choking to death _and_ the cursed object was free. He hooked the loop that was around his neck over the metal frame of the shelf and pulled away _hard,_ and the rope gave just enough for him to gasp in a delicious breath and roll away to assess how FUBAR’d he was.

The rope actually looked like a gold cable—well, the way it was tracking his movements made it look more like a gold snake—and the rod was carved out of deep blue stone that would’ve actually been quite pretty if it hadn’t been trying to kill him. He dived for the curse box but the rope shot out to catch his ankle and slam him back into the floor. He made a deeply offended noise as it began to slither up his leg and waist in a way that was not actually as fun as it looked in the hentai.

Actually, he thought as the rope started to contract around his ribcage, this was less like tentacle porn, more like a boa constrictor—

Ugh, he was _so tired_ of getting strangled—

And then, Cas.

Dean hadn’t heard him, he’d just seemed to appear, like he’d flown, and he swung—was that a crowbar?—into the stone rod with such force that it cracked in half. The rope went stiff around Dean, still wrapped around him too tightly for comfort but at least not actively trying to break his bones. A heartbeat passed like that, Dean still awkwardly half-tangled in gold rope, Cas’s sharp gaze fixed on him, both of them breathing hard and half-braced for another murder attempt. 

Cas looked away first and started to wind the rope, which went soft and pliable again in his hands, around the broken dowel. Dean swallowed. His throat was Mojave Desert dry, mostly because of the choking. “How’d you know to find me?” he rasped.

“I heard the crash from the laundry room and had to assume that you’d gotten into trouble again. Where’s the warded box? It won’t stay broken for long.”

Dean gestured and manfully kept himself from squirming as Cas gently, clinically, untangled the rope and Dean’s legs. When the cord was neatly coiled up, he set it back in its box and penciled on the attached label, _Do not open,_ which was just such a _Cas_ understatement it made Dean grin. “The hell was that, anyway?”

“A Mesopotamian measuring rod and line.”

A horrible suspicion struck Dean. “…Measuring? Like…wait, what does it…do?”

“It measures, Dean. Distances, lengths. Do _not_ make a penis joke,” he added forbiddingly.

“Dude, don’t tell me I nearly kicked it because of a cursed ruler.”

Cas looked as serious as ever, but there was something about the bent of his mouth that made Dean think that he was laughing at him. “There’s no shame in it. They’re symbols of divinity. That was real gold and lapis lazuli; it’s actually quite a valuable piece, or it would be if it didn’t try to kill anyone who comes in contact with it.”

“So I nearly kicked it because of a _fancy_ cursed ruler. Super. Awesome.” Dean closed his eyes. “You can never tell Sam about this. Or anyone. You can _never_ tell Sam or _anyone_ about this.”

“Don’t worry, Dean. Your secret near-strangulation by a measuring line is safe with me,” Cas said, in a bland tone that suggested it was literally going to be the first thing out of his mouth the next time he saw Sam. And God, Dean had missed him.

It hit him now with crushing force, a heavy burden of longing now conspicuous because of its absence, that he’d missed Cas for so long, so deeply; it was an ache to see his face, to take his hand and let himself be pulled to his feet, but a good ache. Dean surveyed him affectionately: the hair that he kept in place with angel vanity instead of hair gel, his steady cool presence and the way he’d indulged in something other than the trenchcoat uniform today, a soft gray t-shirt and—wait—

“Cas. Are those my jeans?”

“No,” Cas lied baldly. 

“I can see the hole where I snagged the leg on a nail!” Come to think of it, he hadn’t worn that shirt in a few years, but it looked familiar too—

“Fine. I put my clothes in your dryer,” which was something he did an absurd amount given that he never actually got dirty. He added grumpily, “I wanted to watch the electrons accumulate.”

“No wonder you always static me when I touch you,” Dean grumbled. He looked at the mess his brief struggle with a Mesopotamian yardstick had made, then back at Cas, who was still frowning at him. Probably pouting over Dean’s lack of appreciation for the effects of friction on fabric; his insides went disgustingly mushy at the thought. “Hey,” he said, “wanna ditch this and go for a ride?”

“Yes,” Cas said, and smiled. And it didn’t hurt to look at Cas anymore; in fact, it hurt to look away.

– ✞ –

They didn’t pull over until the sun was starting to scrape the horizon.

Before that, they drove for hours; Dean took the old county roads west, one-lane tracks of concrete or sometimes plain bleached dirt, no speed limit signs, no turn-offs for miles. Not for the scenery, because this far out from the cities it was mostly wheat, wheat, corn, wheat, and sometimes a power plant or a Wal-Mart that Google Maps had marked down as a town out of pity, but because it could be miles and miles before they saw another car, and in between he and Cas could be the only people in the world.

And they talked. About witches (Dean maintained that the grossest witch death he’d ever seen was the woman whose teeth had been charmed to fall out; Cas reminisced about a _wu_ in Qin China who liked to curse bones to grow so quickly they ripped right out of the skin), Led Zeppelin (”Now, people are gonna tell you that ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is the best thing that ever fell out of Robert Plant’s ass, but those people are uneducated and wrong. Listen, I’m gonna go back to the lead-in to the chorus, really try to get into the genre change this time—”), which Biggerson’s had the best burgers (Cas thought that their downtown Boston location did innovative things with relish, but Dean informed him that no fancy relish tricks could top the joint in Rockville his dad had brought them to after his first hunt), why Dean didn’t like the sensation of static on his clothes (”Because it hurts and you feel like you’re sticking to everything, Cas!”).

And then they sat in silence, “Bring It On Home” floating out of the Impala’s speakers as Dean just—savored the road and Cas all steady reassurance on his right. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Cas smiling at a bird swooping away from the Impala’s purr, one of those awkward-looking black ones that were a scarecrow’s whole reason for being. He thought, abruptly, that this had been a good day.

Kansas was mostly cropland, but in the western reaches of the state, a few hilly areas flirted at being mountains. When Dean pulled over by a grain field, they’d gone so far the craggy rise of the Red Hills was visible in the distance.

This was usually the part where, on the very best of the good old days, he and Sam sat back against the hood of the Impala and drank together in silence. But Dean had forgotten the cooler, and besides, the moment the car came to a stop Cas was already out the door and wading through a knee-high tide of grain.

When he followed, he found Cas sprawled—as much as angels ever sprawled—in the middle of the field, gaze turned up to the rapidly darkening sky and the sun blazing on his face. Like a halo.

“You know, these are probably someone’s crops,” he said but settled himself next to Cas anyway, cheerfully squashing a few unlucky grain stalks.

Cas said, “Just a thousand years ago the crops grown on this land would have been maize and beans. To find wheat, you’d have to cross an ocean. And there was so much alive that is now dead. Plains bison, the passenger pigeons…did you know that you used to be able to find parakeets here? Beautiful green feathers. They used to glisten, like desert glass…

“Only fifteen thousand years ago and no human had ever set foot here. A million years ago, and this was water. 250 million, and the basin those mountains are made from had just begun to form. That’s how they get that color, you know. Iron deposits when the basin would dry up.” There was a warmth to Cas’s voice, a wryness that suggested he wasn’t taking himself as seriously as his words might suggest, but his expression was pensive. “It all changes so quickly.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean said after a rough moment, “who needs the rest of time? We’re here now, right? Gotta make it count, because it’s all you’re getting.” He gave him an elbow-nudge for emphasis, but Cas just turned his frown on Dean, still with that strange sad tint to his eyes.

“It worries Sam when you talk like that.”

“Ha. Sam doesn’t get it.”

“It worries _me_ when you talk like that.”

“You don’t get it either,” Dean said roughly. Extinction and continental drift and the rest of time—way out of his pay grade. Cas was on a different scale. He kept forgetting.

“Tell me,” Cas said. “Dean, please tell me.”

This conversation had taken a strange and depressing turn. It took a while for Dean to get his throat working enough to respond; he hadn’t expected actually wanting to give him a real answer. He should have, though. Winchesters didn’t Talk; even with adopted Winchesters, like Bobby, he couldn’t ever imagine sitting down to a conversation about life philosophies without first getting drunk enough not to remember it in the morning.

Cas was different, though, and always had been. Or maybe he just couldn’t say no when Cas said _please_ like that, so absolutely sure that Dean wouldn’t let him down.

He said finally, “People die. For the dumbest reasons, with no warning at all. It don’t matter where you are or what you do. Sam could quit hunting today and get run over crossing the street for a salad tomorrow. Tomorrow you could be watching someone walk away from you, to—” Cas’s light blue gaze on him made him falter— “to their normal life and their normal job where there ain’t a space for you. Or you could be dead and damned. Can’t think about it going, Cas. You’ve just gotta stay now.”

“You’re not very good at that,” Cas said. 

Dean rubbed the place on his right arm that he still quietly felt ought to ache. Moment over, back to covering up his vulnerabilities with bad jokes. “Guess not. Point still stands, though. Don’t dwell. Repress.”

“I don’t know how I’ve gotten along the last few hundred million years without your unique brand of counseling.”

“Hey, you survived,” Dean said, and started to laugh when Cas gave him what was clearly a _that’s literally not what happened_ look. “Eventually.”

“Strange what death does to your perspective,” Cas said.

“Preaching to the choir, man.”

Finally, Cas smiled. And the bizarre thing that always happened to Dean when he was around Cas happened again: peace.

They sat now in a wheat field on the wrong side of Kansas watching the sun streak the sky with red as it sank lower and lower behind the mountains. And Dean felt that Cas-specific feeling that he had nothing to worry about, nothing that couldn’t wait till tomorrow. No monsters to kill, no people to save, no end times to stop. Sometimes during the desperate year they’d spent trying to kill the devil, it had seemed like someone had paused the countdown when Cas was near, like they could have just that night to drink and say nothing before they had to go back to being poor doomed souls at dawn. Sometimes, Dean had even been able to sleep without dreams.

He could even admit to himself that he didn’t regret forgetting the cooler. This was good, too. Better.

“I missed you, man,” he said before he could beat down the sap that had apparently been welling to dangerous levels inside him.

“You’re a hypocrite,” Cas said.

“I’m—what?”

“A hypocrite. ‘You’ve just gotta stay now,’” he repeated in what was actually a creepily accurate imitation of Dean’s voice. “Well, Dean?”

He was closer now, but Dean was too baffled to think about that. “Hey, I—what? I… _what_?”

“Just—” Cas said, “s _tay now.”_

So close Dean could see the dark sweep of his eyelashes.

 _Make it count,_ Dean heard in his own voice. And then, _Cas. Cas._

He kissed him. Sweetness burst on his tongue.

It was a surprise. He’d seen it coming from a mile off, had been angling for since they’d been an hour out on the road at least. It was terrifying. It _ought_ to be terrifying. He’d spent so long running from it, repressing, not dwelling.

And—this was _Cas_. Cas who smiled at birds like every winged pest that made it into the air like they’d been designed to do was a small miracle, Cas who snarked badly at bad guys, Cas who still tripped up on the littlest human things and watched over him when he slept. He couldn’t ruin Cas, but he’d already ruined Cas—he couldn’t throw himself at him like Dean Winchester, Professional Murderer and Fuck-Up, could possibly compare with all that Cas had already lost. Given up. For him.

But Cas’s hand drifted up to his neck to keep him in place, and his fingers brushed the short hairs at the nape of his neck, and everything was all right. It wasn’t scary at all. It was everything he’d ever wanted.

They broke away from each other, Dean still tasting sweetness and suddenly very self-conscious about not having taken Sam’s advice to shower. “I’ve always wondered how you taste,” Cas sighed.

“Mmffprgh,” Dean declared eloquently. Maybe he was having a stroke? He felt a little like he was having a stroke.

“ _Very_ mmffprgh,” Cas smiled. “And also a little like a parade. _Pour out pure waters, pour out fine oil_ …” he sang, “or, no—that’s a funeral.”

“Wait,” Dean said.

“Dean?”

“Wait. What…did you say?”

Cas’s hand slipped from Dean’s neck. Cold air took his place. “’Pour out pure waters, pour out fine oil—’”

“’The love of my life is dead,’” Dean finished for him.

He’d been dreaming. This morning. He’d dreamed that he’d died and become a demon, that he’d gone back to Hell, that he’d met a waitress he’d slept with and a woman who’d drugged him—

But that was all real. And he was dreaming right now.

“I knew,” he said, hollow, exhausted, wishing for an end to it, “that I wanted it too much for it to be true.”

So he’d passed through the fifth Gate after all, and the sixth had protected itself with this. A lie. A pretty one, one he wouldn’t want to leave. One that would hurt to give up, and he’d have to give it up to go on, because that was the price, right? _The currency of the Underworld is sentiment, not gold._

Like the sun sinking down, the knowledge of how he was meant to wake himself up settled over him, terrible, irresistible.

“Dean. Don’t.”

Against the small of his back he felt the hard-toothed edge of the First Blade like it had just been waiting for him to notice all along.

“ _Dean.”_

He couldn’t look, shouldn’t have looked, but Cas put a steadying hand on his knee and, whoops, there went any choice he had in the matter. There was a Concern Crease in Cas’s brow; his eyes were—God, so blue, the pale blue of clouds lit up against a red sky—and sad. He knew, Dean thought dully. He didn’t think he could listen to whatever came out of Cas’s mouth next.

“I know that you have a—a mission. But you don’t have to go. Let it be, Dean. Let what’s ash stay ash.”

“Let _you_ stay ash,” he said blankly.

“You could be dead and damned tomorrow, isn’t that right? Everyone dies. I just ran out of time.” Cas looked at him with exactly the same pleading look Dean remembered, gorgeous and imploring and so, so dead. “Don’t think about it going, Dean. Just—stay. Please, stay.”

And for a moment, he considered it.

It wasn’t like a djinn dream; there was no creature sucking on him, no keeping track of the hours he’d been under to see how long he had until he cashed in his chips. He was already dead, after all. He could say yes and it would make Cas smile, he could say yes and stay in this world where Sam’s true calling was their weird magic fortress’s plumbing and Cas wandered around like it was his home too, where his biggest worry was the cursed objects in the basement, where he was human.

In the world where Cas had kissed him.

And Cas—the real Cas—would have the rest of time to suffer for his sins.

He reached behind him, pulled out the Blade. His arm ached, but not half as much as the expression on Cas’s face when he caught sight of it, that terrible cruel line of death piercing into this perfect, perfect moment.

“You oughta know,” he told Cas, because he couldn’t handle having that expression aimed at him for long, real or not, “this was a good dream. One of the best.”

Quietly: “Are you going to kill me, Dean?”

“Nah,” Dean said. “I mean, I should. That’s definitely what Hell wants me to do. But—I really shouldn’t have looked back.”

And there was more than one way to kill a dream.

For the record, it was actually pretty hard to drive a blade into your own abdomen, but luckily, Dean had impeccable aim and a high pain threshold. Still, he reckoned that he was probably going to regret not even trying for one last kiss for the rest of his existence.

– ✞ –

He gasped awake on a stone floor, sweetness still lingering in his mouth. He ripped the Blade out of himself as the Mark slowly ground into healing action, like it was resentful that he hadn’t included it in his fantasyland. “Shut up,” he told it. He was lugging around a hollow ache in his chest that had nothing to do with the stab wound, and he didn’t have time for its histrionics.

He’d moved from the office of ETERNAL IMPRISONMENT IN THE PROMISED LAND; he was in a cavern now, like Hell wasn’t even bothering to disguise how deep he’d gone anymore. From wall to wall stretched neat rows of—trees, he guessed, though they were fairly runty for trees. He’d landed in an underground orchard, hefty reddish fruit dangling from the branches. One was by his head, cracked open so that dark red seeds spilled out onto the stone—

Pomegranates. He’d landed in a pomegranate grove. And the taste in his mouth—

Right. He’d _literally_ taken a chunk out of the forbidden fruit. Ha ha, so clever.

Dean closed his eyes and sent out a prayer to the gods of classic rock for patience. “This is _not funny,”_ he gritted out, but got no answer because, of course, Gods and goddesses were just _dicks_ like that.

The worst part was he’d made this exact joke. Right after Crowley had warned him against eating or drinking in Hell.

At the end of this row was the Gate, a long narrow arch that was just wide enough for Dean to squeeze past but which rose up all five, six stories to touch the cave ceiling. The sixth Gate, and the seventh would get him home, but right here, right though that doorway, was Cas. Just twenty feet away.

And if he tried to step through his only way in would, as far as he understood, try to eat his soul. _The Gates are hungry._

He should have been panicking. There was no good reason for him not to be panicking. But a notion—not even a notion, more of a wordless conviction—had been following him from Gate to Gate as he’d made his way down. It flickered into sight now, clearer than ever: a suspicion about his soul, and what Hell had been doing to it.

So Dean grudgingly tolerated the Hell trees, which had _definitely_ been the part of Hell he’d been hoping would get a reprise, until the Mark had totally finished pasting him back together. If he was right, he was going to need the hit points. Once he could stand, he made for the Gate, and, to his credit, only hesitated a moment at the edge of the grove.

This was what he thought:

The last time he’d been down here he’d been decaying, a human warped into demonhood by the constant reality of pain. He’d died as a man who’d tried to be good, a good brother, a good son, to _save_ people, and he’d had that stripped from him, one flayed inch of skin at a time. He’d tried to describe it to Bobby once, that the worst thing about Hell hadn’t been the agony, or the things Alistair had made him see, or the knowledge that this was all he was ever going to get—not that all of that hadn’t sucked, of course—the worst thing had been the way he’d stopped being himself. 

And he’d _felt_ it. The memories that got knocked out of his head. The way every bit of him, every thing he’d been even a little bit proud of, that he took care of his family, that he kept people from the pain of losing loved ones, all crumbled away until all there was was the blade.

Bobby hadn’t gotten it, not really. Sam might have, but Dean had never tried to bring it up until it was too late, and then it wasn’t too late but by then Sam had his own Hell traumas to worry about. He’d never tried telling Cas. He had a feeling, though, that Cas already knew.

This time, he’d strolled into Hell a demon. And it should have been easy. He’d started this little descent chomping at the bit to hand over whatever of the old Dean Winchester he had left that Hell would want. But it hadn’t wanted his humanity.

It had just wanted _him_. Every horrible black piece of his soul, everything about himself that he held dear, and it had made him fork it all over with his own hands to pay his way through: the relief from the dreck of _feeling_ that had always strangling him, the luscious pleasure of a good kill, even his weird little thing with Crowley. The way that, for the first time in forever, he’d felt like he was in charge of what happened to him, not the other way around. Asshole hassling his one night stand? Break his face. Sam on his tail? Kill him. Cas in Hell? _Get him back_.

And…maybe the old Dean Winchester hadn’t been entirely absent. As a demon, he’d never dreamed about kissing Cas, but then, as a demon, he’d never dreamed at all. Maybe that part had been both of them, the hunter and the killer and their shared, wordless craving for the angel that had saved them. Could save them.

And after hours—days—weeks?—losing pieces of himself, he thought his black-smoke soul might be partly white light now. Maybe half-and-half.

Maybe enough that the Gate would trap some of him, not all of him, if he tried to step through it.

He wasn’t actually sure whether he wanted it to be the demon piece or the human piece. Which, he acknowledged, was probably pretty fucked up of him. As was the large probability that his hunch about how the Gates worked was completely wrong, and he would be trapped here forever, in the pomegranate grove of clichés about love. Luckily, there was just enough demon left in him to not care too terribly about that.

Dean walked into the Gate, and pain crashed down on him like a wall.

It _hurt._ It _felt_ like something was actually being ripped out of him, and he couldn’t escape it—it was electrifying agony to raise his foot to take a step—the world seemed washed out with light but he couldn’t tell if that was his soul or his occipital lobe was getting fried by the pain. He plowed forward through the wrenching misery, even though it felt like he was trying to leave his skeleton behind; his arm was on _fire_ as the Mark screamed in protest.

And uncurling from him, from his fingers, from around his heart, he thought he felt something oily and sulfurous lift—

He turned his head in time to see a curl of smoke, aimless and tame now that it was unattached to a consciousness, reach for him from where it was caught on the wrong side of the threshold, and wondered if it was disappointment or relief that leaped in his throat.

And then he was through. And Angel Hell stretched out before him, as beautiful and impossible as Eden of old.

– ✞ –

The final rest of fallen angels was a bare, stony vista, all low mountains and hard crags of rock scraping against a vast dark sea. On level stretches a few tough, stringy trees scrabbled for purchase against the rock. And the sky. Still no sun, but behind a scattering of black stormclouds, the sky blazed with an unnatural rosy light like a meteor lighting up the night as it burned out.

There was something wild and… _pure_ about it all.

Like it had never been touched by human hands, he realized. If the stories had it right, the closest thing to him this part of Hell had ever seen had been a goddess.

And all around: monsters.

In the distance, he could see huge, indescribable creatures clashing with each other, rending each other limb from scale from head from limb. A faceless, skeletal nightmare with wings and antlers jutting from its crown—a thing at the base of the nearest mountain that looked like a _Dune_ sandworm if sandworms were made out of tornadoes—something that might be a griffin if it didn’t have too many heads tearing at some kind of lumpy, furry horror with patchy bat wings. Farther back, where the landscape faded into silhouettes against the sky, he could see massive, slow-moving shadows threading their way through the mountains, over the sea, monsters so big he couldn’t really comprehend it.

Not monsters, he thought, a terrible cold dread dawning on him. Angels. The true faces of dead angels.

And something else. He squinted at the reddish stain lighting up the sky. Like the rest of Hell, there was no sun, but there was a definite light source--through the corona he thought he could make out a silhouette--a box--a cage--

The Cage.

Dean’s blood ran frigid in his veins. He knew he couldn’t hear anything. It was just his imagination, the sound of something terrible clashing far in the distance, screams and the sound of rending grace, an apocalypse contained.

Dean tore his gaze away from the source of all his brother’s nightmares and surveyed the barren, stark landscape with a new sense of trepidation.

He hadn’t thought—how was he going to find Cas? _The size of the Chrysler building_ wasn’t a very specific description, and when he looked out the mountains and sea seemed to go on forever, but he didn’t have that long, not anymore. He could feel it, his heart beat in his chest and he could _feel_ it, that the Gate had stripped more than the black eyes from him when he’d passed through.

He lived, and that meant that he had until he died again to find Cas, find the Gate, and get them both out of here. And Cas—but it was Cas.

And Dean felt, in a sharp rush of resolution, that he would recognize him anywhere. _I’ll know him_ , Dean thought. _I know him._

He picked his way down the slope, cutting a path over the slick incline of rock that would take him to the mountains while staying as far from the tornadoworm as humanly possible. Looking for Cas in a world of dead monsters was practically a habit by now, but there was no need to tempt the science fiction fates.

– ✞ –

He started towards the bluff because it seemed well-protected; it hugged the rock face low to the ground and the side of the mountain and a scattering of trees sheltered it from most angels. The ridge jutted out over the basin which tilted between the wave of peaks he’d just hauled himself over and the next clump of mountains. Shade and a tactical view of both the uneven ground below and the jagged climb ahead seemed just what he needed.

The hours, maybe by now most of a day, hadn’t been as grinding as they could’ve been; the ranges were riddled with low passes, and he’d cleared the first line of mountains with barely any trouble at all. It had been the second wave that had given him trouble, with the boulder-hopping and steep climbs that were the only way to get over what he’d affectionately named Mt. Shitcreek, to go with its neighbors Mt. Fucked, Mt. Super Fucked, and Mt. Not As Tall As Super Fucked.

And, as he’d found out the hard way, he wasn’t safe from fallen angels.

Now he inched down the far side of Mt. Shitcreek, keeping a paranoid eye out for loose gravel _and_ grotesque Lovecraftian horrors. He’d seen a few brawling with each other or just prowling through the rock or the sky overhead, but most were, for the first time in his life as Dean Winchester, Nasty Shit Magnet, content to ignore him. Which firstly helped to rule them out as Cas (look, it wasn’t vanity if it was true), and secondly had been nice since he didn’t like his odds against what looked like a thunderstorm crossed with a Komodo dragon.

But there’d been one close call just as he’d been rounding the crest of Mt. Super Fucked, worried about having missed Cas already, worried that he was already tired and thirsty and couldn’t risk getting Hell in his mouth again, when he hadn’t noticed that the mud pit churning under an overhang had hands until it had one of those hands wrapped around his calf.

Fists the size of small boulders tapering to a torso and face that looked almost normal, might’ve even been beautiful, a Renaissance _David_ with neat curls and serene expression, if not for the way its whole upper body had been melting like a toddler’s mud sculpture left out in the sun. For a moment he’d thought maybe—but there was something malicious and dark in its hollow pits of eyes, and Cas had never looked at him like that, not even when he’d been betraying him. Dean had felt his ankle give out under him and had known, in a soul-deep _the sky is blue_ kind of way, that he was boned; he’d cried out—

And the mud monster angel ( _so much less sexy_ than his usual dreams involving mud pits and angels) had frozen. Not really frozen, more a—wavering, half a moment where it went distracted and insubstantial. Which had been long enough for Dean to yank his foot free and take off down Mt. Super Fucked, since he wasn’t an idiot all the time.

Somehow, he’d heard the angel’s outraged scream behind him, though no sound reached him but a whisper of wind.

His ankle had gradually moved from disgruntled stabbing when he ran to the occasional dull throb, but he’d still spent the whole way down kicking himself regardless. He couldn’t do that again. He didn’t have a clue what had made the angel _distort_ like that, had given him the chance to get away; there were rules to this place that he didn’t have the time to figure out and which probably involved too much physics for him anyway. If he were smart, he’d get out before he actually needed to know.

Still, the thought of leaving Cas here—no. Incomprehensible.

So: find Cas, find the Gate, resurrect them both. Impossible, but he’d done that before.

And then maybe, when they got back to the bunker, he’d take Cas out on a drive. What he wanted after that was also impossible, but…he’d done it before, too.

He dropped the last few feet to the ledge and let himself take a breath. It was pretty wide, would’ve made a nice spot to park his Baby and enjoy the view, if it hadn’t been in Angel Hell. He moved close to the edge. On the other side of the trees stubbornly rooted in the rock, there was a bit of shade from the unrelenting Judgment Day mood lighting, and an angel.

Fuck. Shit. _Fuck_. He hated falling for the same trick twice in a row. It was _embarrassing._

It was a ten-foot drop to the gully cutting between Mt. Shitcreek and Mt. Not As Tall As Super Fucked; he could make the jump. He ought to make the jump. His heart was beating so hard he thought it might bruise his ribcage, but, but…

But the angel was small, not like the other giants that wandered over the dirt and salt of Angel Hell, and slumped helplessly against the rock face. But it shone, pinpricks of light that clustered into the loose shape of a man. But it was the first angel Dean had seen that looked both terrible and beautiful, instead of just terrible. But it didn’t look like an angel at all. He looked like a man.

But Dean knew him, because he’d know him anywhere.

His resurrected heart pounded: _Cas. Cas. Cas._

He was kneeling in front of Cas, wasn’t quite sure how he got there but these things happened when people found out about their friends really being constellations, gasping, “Cas, _Cas._ ” Pure gladness burst in him and it felt like the Mark, the same way the world narrowed down to what was in front of him and everything else stopped mattering. 

“You got any idea how long I’ve been looking for you? Man, leave a breadcrumb trail next time,” he said. “Or, _stop dying_. That works too.” He reached for him but wasn’t sure if he could manage a touch without frying his brains out—Cas would know, though, Cas always knew, and he would know Dean as surely as Dean knew him, would reach back, would always reach back—

But Cas didn’t move. Didn’t even look at Dean. He was just light, but where his limbs overlapped he shone brighter so Dean could get a sense of him, and he just sat curled into himself with a knee pulled to his chest. His shoulders were hunched, like he was bracing for a blow. “Cas,” Dean tried. “Can you hear me? Cas, you gotta be hearing me.”

He closed the rest of the distance to Cas’s hand. His fingers passed _through_ the lights, like there was nothing solid there, but he only had time to consider that for a horrified second before a place at the back of his head, the same place where he’d heard the Clayface angel scream, churned with someone else’s color and hurt and _despair—_

And Cas’s voice, God, that voice, _dean dean dean dean dean_

Almost drowning with it, with that _sadness_ , but he forced out, “Yeah, Cas, it’s _me_ , I found you—”

_dean dean dean dean dean dead_

Dean jerked his hand away, and it stopped. His fingers ached like he’d dunked them in ice water.

He took Cas’s hand again. Once more, wordlessly, silently, his head exploded with Cas’s— _Casness_ , that cool intelligence, that patience, that weird great-great-grandad sense of humor, that steady, unwavering kindness, and all of it concentrated on a single grief-stricken point of _dean dean dean dean dean_

“Cas,” he said, and then, “Cas.”

A hard lump throbbed in Dean’s throat. For the first time, he noticed that Cas’s form was hazy, motes of light drifting out of position and back again. There were…holes, long lines in his chest and stomach where it seemed like someone— _something_ —had just smacked the light there out of him. Dean glanced around, noticed that where they were crouching a few little bits of light winked at him from where they were scattered through the air and ground into the rock.

“Shit,” he said. His muscles felt cold and shaky. With his free hand, he tried to sweep up the loose bits of light—Cas’s grace?—but they slipped between his fingers, just like Cas had. “Cas, you gotta help me out here, I don’t know what to do—I never thought I’d be saying this to a big cluster of lights, but you don’t look too hot, and I don’t know how to help—”

_can’t help leave me alone_

“So you _can_ hear me, huh, you son of a bitch?” he said triumphantly. It was definitely triumph making his voice so rough and cracked, nothing else. “Look, I can’t carry you, so you need to get up, Cas. I’m gonna get you out of here, but you need to _get up_.”

_leave me alone dean dean dean dean_

“Nice fucking try. You’re not staying, but the only way either of us is gonna get out of here is if you _help—_ Cas, please. I, I can’t even _touch_ you.”

_dean dean dean dean dean dean dean_

“I’m right fucking here!” Dean snarled, regretted it, held back the stinging in his eyes with sheer furious will.

Cas’s thoughts shifted, turned accusatory, mutinous: _dean dean dean dean_ dead

All the anger drained out of him. He closed his eyes, focused only on the pins-and-needles in his fingers and Cas’s voice in his brain.

“Fuck, Cas,” he said wetly, “you oughta know better than that. Death ain’t something that could stop me from getting to you.”

 _dean,_ Cas said again, but a little differently this time: maybe a little less despair, a little more bewilderment. Something with wings fluttered in Dean’s chest. Then, like a gasp— _behind you_

He shouldn’t have closed his eyes.

Dean spun just in time to catch the moment the angel alighted on the ledge. It was small, as angels went, but still cleared Dean’s height by a good three feet. It was more or less human-shaped—too thin, the limbs too long—but it was made entirely of black fibers that coiled and tangled to give its body and wings shape. The cables that made up its flesh were too rigid to give it features, so it looked upon Dean without eyes or a face but still with some indefinable expression of pleasure that made his blood run cold. Colder.

He put himself between the thing and Cas. God, its claws—they didn’t look sharp, but then whatever it was made of didn’t look like it could hold together a conscious being either—one hit and Cas might scatter. He opened his mouth to launch a stinging battle quip—

And nothing. Like his throat had caught spontaneous Hell paralysis syndrome.

 _Now,_ the angel said in the back of his head, _why don’t we try again with our indoor voice?_

He didn’t know what he mouthed voicelessly at it in return, but it was probably just a furious string of expletives. Fuck you and your fucking dog too, that sort of thing. It seemed amused by him at least; there was a tickle at the back of his skull that felt like laughter before it said in its rich clear voice, _Really, now. My, my, my. You can figure out how to sneak your grubby little self in here, but not how to maintain a simple telepathic conversation? They’re really letting the quality of their intrepid heroes slide nowadays._

 _TAKE ANOTHER STEP AND I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU,_ Dean thought at it with all his might.

 _You see,_ that’s _why I froze your vocal cords. You humans are just so…loud. Distasteful. Now, we can have a polite conversation, none of that unseemly shouting._

 _YEAH? I THOUGHT IT WAS BECAUSE YOU’RE BITTER ABOUT MISSING OUT WHEN GOD WAS HANDING OUT THE MOUTHS_ , Dean thought-shouted, more out of contrariness than anything. Fuck, he hoped this wasn’t the end for them. If he and Cas bit it because of the fallen angel of proper manners he was sure Sam would somehow find out to rub it in his face from beyond the grave.

 _I will admit it levels the playing field, so to speak; mechanical speech is a bit cruder than my form permits, I’m afraid._ It did something with its featureless face that gave Dean the impression it was giving him a toothy smile. _However, any attempt to stimulate quiet contemplation in the human species should be taken on principle._

_SCREW YOU. IF YOU WANTED A MONK YOU SHOULD’VE KIDNAPPED SOME OTHER GUY’S ANGEL._

_Angel?_ Its approximation of a voice rose and fell in false surprise. _That poor broken thing behind you is no_ angel _. That’s what_ you _would look like, human, were you not still connected to your mortal flesh._

Against his will, he pulled back, so startled he forgot to yell. _Of course he’s a freaking angel. He’s in freaking Angel Hell._

 _Our Heavenly Father gives you the earth, but not the brains to think your way out of a paper box,_ it sighed. A brush of smugness against his mind that made Dean think of Metatron, of Crowley, of every teacher he’d ever had who’d called on him and knew with confident pleasure that he couldn’t answer. Grace _is what makes an angel an angel, simple child. And yet Castiel dies from lack of Grace. He dies enough of an angel to catch the attention of God’s little box, but the act of dying ought to erase his consciousness, his_ being _, with nothing left for Gehenna to pluck from time._

 _But,_ it continued, _there is this one thing—somewhere along the way, Castiel has fallen far enough that he has grown himself this little half a soul. So it takes that instead._ Laughter scraped at the back of Dean’s head. Not a tickle this time—it felt like a cheese grater to the scalp—but he barely noticed; his heart was in his useless throat. _Isn’t that a new one! Hundreds of thousands of years of depravity in our eternal jail, and I’ve never met an angel who sinned himself into a monkey._

A soul. Cas had a _soul._ Dean wanted to punch the smug bastard in its blank black-wire face, he wanted to gather Cas up in his arms and keep him locked up safe and warm to coax the other half of his soul into bloom, he wanted to kiss him, more than anything he wanted to kiss him.

But he couldn’t do any of those. Instead he let himself steal a glimpse of where Cas was curled behind him and thought to himself, _That’s what Cas’s soul looks like_. It shone out with the delicate strength of a thousand thousand glints of light, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

 _He’s told me a few things, you know,_ the angel mused. _Well, when I could coax coherence out of him. Humans are so…fleshy. You need a brain to have proper thoughts, imagine! You’re still connected to yours, for all the good it does you, but_ this _little mutation is just a_ mess _of feeling and tortured conscience. For weeks and months, just screaming and squalling and carrying on like that without end._

He…should say something. Keep it talking, even if every histrionic word that sank into his head made him want to start throwing punches, give himself time to come up with some miracle plan—hey, it had happened before. At the very least, prove the bullshit it was spewing about monkeys and their brains wrong. But it was hard enough to wrestle thoughts into the shape of this kind of speech when his head wasn’t stuffed full of the idea of Cas having a soul. Or Cas dead and disoriented and still, _still_ thinking about Dean. Grieving for Dean. Calling his name. (But he understood, though it grated like barbed wire wrapped around his ribs. His heart had been beating out a lover’s tattoo of _Cas, Cas, Cas_ for…a long time.)

Luckily for his fumbling struggle to wrestle his emotions out of the way of rational thought, the angel seemed content enough to monologue at him, which—was typical, actually. Divine ego was annoying, but it had its uses. _I must’ve asked him a thousand times to quiet himself, but the poor little thing simply doesn’t seem to understand_. _He’s quite lucky that most of our brothers here—well,_ my _brothers here—would just as well ignore him. They have very little interest in humans as a concept. Myself, I’m not so close-minded. He can be quite diverting after you knock him about a bit._

 _Yeah, you’re a regular humanitarian,_ Dean snapped. _So I guess those—_ he struggled to find a word for the awful absence of those gashes that scattered Cas’s light through the air, came up short— _marks through Cas’s torso are your work, huh? Is that your shtick? Two-for-one special: finishing school and torture with a view?_

 _If you’ve an issue with the scenery, you’ll have to take it up with dear Castiel, I’m afraid. He’s rather attached._ A genuinely wondering note tempered the irony laced through the vibrations in Dean’s head. _Remarkable, isn’t it? It seems the survival instinct is something else tied to a mortal body. He ought to run, hide himself away somewhere dark and deep, somewhere too small for angels that want to play with him a bit to reach, but he doesn’t. I think he likes the flowers._

There was something wrong there, but he couldn’t take the time to tease it out; the angel moved closer then, and it was fast, faster than Dean had expected a thing made out of wire wrapped around light to be. It seemed to flow through the air like quicksilver until it was just two, three paces away from him. _So much hostility,_ it went on conversationally, which was definitely the mildest way to describe what Dean wanted to do to it. _You have the shape of me wrong, human._

_Yeah? You don’t get your kicks from pawing all over defenseless souls?_

_When I walked the earth, very long ago, of course, you were a young race still, barely stumbling towards civilization. I studied you then: your base needs, your sloppy hunger, your desires…a flawed miscarriage of evolution you might have been, but certainly a fascinating one. I was a bit of an expert on the subject. In fact, I was cast down for it. And of course, there are no humans here, in Gehenna. In_ Angel Hell. _Until, of course, Castiel. And now you._

The angel reached out and drew a finger down his cheek, and though he wanted to throw up on it for both hatred- and gut-churning nausea-related reasons, he stood his ground, kept himself between it and Cas’s glittering vulnerability. _You should worry less about Castiel, sweet child_. _It has been such a_ long _time since a human has wandered through the Gates to entertain me; I’ll be too absorbed with you to have any time to spare for a little abomination like him for a decade at least._

 _Yay us_ , he thought at it, but threats of unending torment were old hat by now. Something else had caught his attention. _Wait—humans?_ Other _humans? I thought you didn’t get visitation rights?_

 _Oh,_ it laughed, _they don’t come_ here _. No, no, only one path leads through our little prison and out again. Sometimes, though, we might…slip through the cracks in the firmament, you know. Just pieces of ourselves, and never very long. But enough that you might catch us as the beasts of other stories._

And then, before Dean’s eyes, it began to change _._ Its wire-frame form distended and bulged as it hunched and yet seemed to stretch even taller, its fingers curled until they gained the wicked curve of claws, its blank face unraveled and reraveled itself until its shape seemed less human and more canine. He stumbled back as from each side of its head where an ear might’ve been another face seemed to melt out of the shade, until it leered at him with its three faces blurring into each other, all with monstrous cable-wire snarls.

 _All stories are this story, after all,_ it finished, its voice now a ravenous triple growl that rattled through Dean’s head.

The transformation had brought out some restless animal energy in the angel; it paced tight, controlled steps that had its claws digging bluntly into the rock. It didn’t jump him though, content enough to let the anticipation of a fight flavor the air. Marinate, Dean thought in spite of himself. He didn’t run, though every prey instinct bred in the bone was screaming at him, sending his heart rate wild; years of practice had taught him when a tense conversation was about to pull too taut, when the lure of drawing blood was starting to look better to an enemy than the charm of blowing smoke up their own asses. They weren’t quite there. Yet.

Time. He needed time. He needed a plan, and he needed to keep its attention off Cas, and he needed _time_ , and he could feel it winding away. _And what happens to them, huh? The humans you meet in Hell._

 _Mostly, I devour them. The humans that are desperate enough to walk into Hell are the_ tastiest _kind._

_Mostly? What about the ones you don’t?_

_Oh,_ it laughed, a amused sound like barbed wire and broken glass, _you needn’t worry about that_. _You don’t seem like a harpist to me._

The tension between them snapped. The angel that had bent itself into the shape of a three-headed dog lunged.

Dean dodged the first blow simple enough, but the angel hadn’t even caught itself on the rock before it was lashing out again, fast as thought, faster. And he’d landed wrong, smacking his knee on the unforgiving ground; this strike caught him off guard, he’d known it was fast but its limbs were so long, its proportions so off, that he hadn’t expected this natural canine grace. He rolled out of the way but badly, off-balance. This time he hit the ground hard.

The Blade found its way into his hand on automatic, as much a reflex as ducking away from sharp objects aimed at his head, and that should work. He’d killed angels with it before, it could probably handle even dead angels in their true forms in Angel Hell.

But it felt brittle to the touch, no surge of unnatural strength as it connected with the Mark, no murderer’s instinct that had spiked through his brain even the first time he’d held it in Cuthbert Sinclair’s sitting room. It didn’t feel like every fratricide in fifteen thousand years anymore. It felt like a jawbone clenched in a grip as weak as water. Fuck, _months_ of dancing to its tune and _now_ it decided to malfunction—

But it wasn’t the Blade, he thought, it was him—lead in his arms, weighing him down—he could’ve been holding an angel blade or Ruby’s knife or his .45 and still been fighting back a shakiness in his fingers. He’d given it up, after all. Given up killing to get to Cas, and Hell didn’t seem keen on giving that back to him—

The angel reached for him and he raised the Blade to meet it, tried to catch its claws on the bone and hoped that ancient goddesses saw the difference between death and self-defense. It swatted it away with an ease no one else had ever felt against the whisper of first murder in that weapon. 

Again, ground-up laughter burbled into the back of his head, and then, like it was basking in the pleasure of the moment, _My, my, you must have done quite a number on yourself to squander a weapon like_ that.

Bastard didn’t even seem to appreciate how goddamn lucky it was to have met him on an off day. He was probably one of maybe four people on the planet that regularly carried around something that would kill a dead angel, and he _couldn’t even use it._ The angel struck him so hard he blacked out for a second or two. Then one of its faces dug its jaws into the back of his neck like he was a disobedient pup and tossed him twenty feet through the air.

Only some automatic reflex made him reach out and clamp onto one of the small boulders anchored at the edge of the ridge to break his skid and keep himself from going over; his conscious mind was consumed with trying to remember how to breathe around the way his lungs had locked up, gagging without sound because the son of a bitch wouldn’t even let him cough out loud—

The angel stalked towards him, cool and sure of having beaten most of the fight out of him with just a few blows. _Playing_ with him. Dean gritted his teeth; it was flattering itself. Current score: Winchester, down one demonic healing factor, one invincible weapon, one ability to kill anything, at all. God’s Most Irritating Mistake: up one being an angel, with all the power and ego implied.

It wasn’t wrong, though. This was another one he wasn’t going to be able to punch his way out of. The world had turned blurry and soft around the edges, and he wasn’t sure whether that was the spasm in his lungs or—well.

 _Sorry, Cas,_ he thought. He was going to go down fighting, he always did, but—he wished he wasn’t going to take Cas down with him. But that had always been the way of them, hadn’t it?

Hell, Purgatory, the end of the world. Dean fell, and Cas followed. Dean died, and Cas _burned_.

And he could never, ever save him.

A dark smudge moved far below; Dean blinked away the despair clouding his vision to see another angel slinking through the ravine, one of the chimera-like ones, all mammoth tusks and overlapping scales like a pangolin and massive vulture wings folded on its back. He got a very, very dumb idea.

In his head, the first angel’s voice, oozing vicious and slow like an oil slick. _You know, I think we’ve upset the little cross-breed,_ it told him, warm, confidential. _I didn’t think he had the capacity to notice anything but pain and lack of pain, but you should hear the way he’s whining and moaning now. Ha, perhaps I’ll show you later! Something to keep you company once I start on your intestines—_

Dean threw the boot he’d wrestled off his foot in those moments off the ridge.

It bounced off the anteater-angel’s thin, spiny tail. Its gaze snapped to where he was dangling half off the bluff, and when its massive lion’s maw opened, Dean heard its displeased roar rattle silently between his ears.

Its wings unfolded, ragged brown shapes with feathers that must’ve been three or four times the length of Dean’s whole body, and it gave a massive flap—another—and behind him, the angel howled in his head in disbelieving fury, tore into his back with such force that he tried to scream though he knew he wouldn’t get the relief of it, snarled, _You little primitive brat, you jumped-up primate, you barely sentient_ abortion _of genetics—_

The anteater-angel barreled into it, knocked it into midair. And off of Dean. _Bye-ee,_ he thought smugly at it.

It turned out that angels so disdainful of humans they’d rather tear into other angels than join in the fun had their uses after all.

The angels clawed and ripped at each other, a mess of animal features and wings defying all known properties of physics to keep them aloft, until anteater-angel managed to get a claw around one of smug-shapeless-bastard-angel’s snouts and slam it into the mountainside. He hoped the vain fucking bastard was sorely regretting every drop of information it had been ever so eager to hear itself share with the stupid little pest that had wandered into its playground.

And Dean— _ached_. He was bleeding through his t-shirt, which now had huge bloody gouges in the back to match the huge bloody hole in the front where he’d stabbed himself through the chest not that long ago. It still hurt to breathe, and the Mark wasn’t bothering to patch him up. But there was no telling how much longer the angels were going to be dancing the tango fantastic, so he dragged himself more-or-less upright and crawled over to Cas.

That whole nasty, strained, briefly violent exchange and Cas hadn’t moved from where he was curled against the dubious shelter of the rock wall. If anything, he’d drawn himself closer, rested his head-approximation on his knee-approximation and wound his almost-arms around himself like if he could pretend nothing was happening, nothing really would be happening.

He looked the same as he had when Dean had first stumbled off the mountain and figured it out: hazy, splintering, all light broken up by gashes of negative space that he was sure were a match for the ones on his back. Rationally, it didn’t matter. The soul was immortal; Dean’s attached meatsack probably made him more vulnerable in this realm than Cas was.

But—it all _hurt_ more now. Cas had bounced in and out of angelhood for years, and, except for this last time, it hadn’t really mattered whether he could burn out evil with a touch or talk to cats at any given moment; Grace or not, there had always been something wrathful and divine about him. Dean had seen him drunk and dead and working a minimum-wage job and drugged out of his mind, and for all that in his mind and memory Cas had fixedly remained Castiel, the angel. Now, he looked at Cas, looked at his _soul_ , and thought without meaning to: _human._ Now, the idea of Cas hurting _bruised_. He knew it wouldn’t do anything to sweep up the fragments of him that had been knocked out of place, but he wanted to anyway.

“Cas,” he said. Whatever mojo had been wrapped around his larynx had faded, but his voice was so scraped-raw with feeling he could still barely hear himself. He knelt next to Cas and reached for where his sort-of hand was clenched tightly on his sort-of knee. This was easier, anyway.

 _Cas_ , he thought, to the background noise of his name felt over and over in that tone of wrenching grief, _Cas, listen to me. Cas, you gotta listen to me._

 _Cas, we’re in kind of in the shit here. I bought us some time, but we’ve gotta_ move, _that—_ he couldn’t think of just one word for the bastard so what he ended up think-saying was more a jumble of expletives and a stab of rage— _might be back any time. And I can’t—Cas, I can’t hold it off, I gave that up for you—and I can’t stop it—it’s gonna be picking our flesh and…whatever the hell you’re made of out of its teeth—we don’t have a chance unless you GET UP AND RUN FOR IT, and—and Cas, you can’t stay here. You can’t. I can’t let you stay._

Quietly, like an echo (except Dean’s own mental voice had never sounded like this, like brass bells in the mountains, so old and clear and sad): _let me stay_

Another surge of anger rose in him, so whitely hot that Dean was surprised his throat hadn’t blistered from the heat. Frustrated, protective rage; why does he keep _doing_ this, why doesn’t he get it, doesn’t he know what it does to me, every time, every time— _NO. No, I—no, don’t you know where you are?—and I’m not leaving here without you—and we don’t have the goddamn time for—and Cas, what the_ fuck _is so important it’s worth this—worth the_ pain _—worth_ the rest of time _somewhere you don’t belong_ — Worth more than me, he wanted to say, but even in his head it was hard to bend that formless longing into words.

 _penance,_ Cas whispered.

 _Penance_ — Dean closed his eyes and tightened his grip on Cas’s hand, which, like closing his fist on light, ended with him just digging his nails into his own palm. _Where do I even—fuck, Cas, I don’t even know what it is you’re brooding about this time—we can work out whatever it is later, when we’re_ not in Hell, alive _—if you want to make something right you can’t do it down here—believe me, I’m a freakin’ authority that there’s no_ justice _to what goes on down here—_ and he balled up the flashbacks, the horror, the frenzy and the fire and the sick pleasure that he’d never told another soul about, and thrust it out at where Cas’s mind met his like an offering, like a toll.

Cas drank it in. When it was over, he said, sadly, _yes so penance_

_CAS, FOR GOD’S SAKE._

_for dean’s sake_

_Are you hearing me at all? Are you hearing_ yourself _at all?! What have you done that is so godawful you could_ ever _think that this is—that this could be—_ but the sick creeping feeling in his gut splintered his focus, made it impossible to finish that thought.

 _dean,_ Cas ached.Dean opened his mouth to remind him that he was right there, _right here, damnit_ , but then the golden shimmer of Cas’s soul started to move, his nearly-a-hand uncurling from where it was clenched on his nearly-a-knee to drift over the space between them, to settle over Dean’s heart. He didn’t breathe for fear of disturbing it.

 _dean is dead,_ Cas said again, and this time Dean remembered that was where Metatron had stabbed him two long, dead months ago.

_Cas…I’m not. I’m here. I’m alive._

_felt it_ , Cas insisted. _dead and dark-eyed failed i failed_

 _Cas_ , Dean said, helpless, _Cas, it wasn’t your fault._

_my fault_

I _took the Mark,_ I _made that choice—_

 _damned again smoke again and my fault,_ and a flicker of the memories Dean had pushed at Cas reached back to him now: pain and forever and the slow and total loss of self. It stopped him in his mental tracks. _my ward my fault_

_It doesn’t work like that._

_my dean my fault_

_Cas,_ Dean said, and choked on what to say next. _You couldn’t have saved me_ or _You did save me_ or _You can’t punish yourself forever._

And he understood—the distant understanding of an aloof observer, the way a man understood the idea of water in the desert—why the woman in the impossible dress had called what she’d asked of him a _favor_. The rare chance to learn a lesson before the knowledge was demanded of him.

She’d known— _Hell_ had known—that it would have to come to this, to Cas’s grief, Cas’s strength. That the only person whose feelings about his quest mattered was Cas. From the very beginning.

He’d never had a choice in how this would end at all.

 _Cas, Cas,_ he thought-ached, and didn’t know how to go on. It felt like whispering every night in Purgatory, like watching Sam die and pleading to nothing, like prayer. 

He said:

 _I’m begging you, Cas_. _This is me begging, ‘cause that’s all I’ve got left. I don’t know how to save us. I don’t know how to fix you and I don’t know how to—_ fix _you, and any minute now we’re going to be two kinds of kibble, and it’s gotta be you, your choice._

_Because—because I don’t know what to do. Cas. Cas. I need you, Cas. Please._

Silence for a long moment, for too long of a moment. Dean let his head fall. He'd never expected to be enough anyway—

_dean_

Low and clear as bells singing through high mountains.

_dean i come when you need_

Dean opened his eyes. They stung with sweat and—other things. The cluster of lights that approximated Cas’s head had lifted, tilted, regarded him now without eyes or features but still the same piercing, fond, exasperated gaze Dean knew like he knew his own mind. God, Cas. _Cas._

 _of course,_ Cas told him sternly, _i come when you need_

Cas’s free hand came up to wrap around where Dean’s were incompetently folded over and into his other hand so that they were wholly holding on to each other, light over flesh over light. Cas’s _Cas_ ness was bubbling at the back of Dean’s brain, still a thready raw torrent of feeling, but the grief was leaching out now and resolve and warmth and something too bright and incredible for Dean to imagine rising to take its place. _dean_ , Cas said, and now his name in that almost-a-voice sounded shocking in its beauty, sounded like music. _dean,_ Cas sang, and then he began to burn.

Every firefly-speck, every golden grain and dust mote woven into the fabric of Cas’s person began to smolder with radiance, light gathering light unto itself like someone had turned Cas’s dial up to the max and just kept going. Dean had shaded his eyes from angels enough times to be able to recognize their cold radiance, intense like distant stars. But this—Cas’s light was consuming, relentless. And _warm_. He remembered with a punch of shock (joyous? terrified?) the flushed heat of the human soul, those few times he’d been close enough to touch one.

And God, it set something singing in his chest to see the dim figure of his friend surge into vitality and then beyond that; he kept his eyes open like he could feast on the sight, even though in a moment Cas was made up of light so bright Dean felt his corneas begin to burn, even though a moment after that he was so bright he blotted out the rest of the world—

—and then it all rushed back, the ridge and the trees and the sound of angels scratching at each other above, as the light that made up Cas sucked itself back into a hard, bright ball about the size of Dean’s fist. A soul, the way Dean remembered them, faintly blue at the edges like the intensity of all that concentrated light had changed its tint. He held up his hands—free now, the nearly-hands they’d been clutching vanished from his grasp. His fingers were trembling.

The soul— _Cas’s soul—_ drifted into his reach. His fingers closed around it reflexively, and held.

He could _touch it_.

 _dean dean dean set me as a seal upon thy heart_ , Cas whispered.

He let it go. It drew nearer, like it was magnetized to whatever crumbling wreck Dean was carrying around in his own chest, and then _sank_ into him over his heart—it hurt, a familiar pain, the pain of Benny cramming his consciousness into his arm, of always keeping one thought on the flesh there to make sure the poor bastard didn’t spill out as they scrambled for the portal, but Dean welcomed it, pulled the bruising ache to himself with a fierce possessiveness—and it was only a moment before he could _feel_ Cas’s presence nestled alongside his organs, safely tucked behind his ribs so he couldn’t accidentally lose him on the way out. He was a strange knot in Dean’s chest, foreign but good. Like the cool security of Cas at his flank, like the weight of his hand on his shoulder, like a kiss.

 _dean_ , Cas crooned. Still not grief, but something as raw, as painful. Dean wanted to cry.

_Cas, I—_

From overhead, the _crack_ of a massive body slamming through layers of stone broke his concentration. In his ribcage the sound made Cas quiver, a fine tremor Dean felt bounce off his bones. It smacked him into action, sent him hurdling towards the edge of the ridge. Right. Later. They could do all of that later. He had Cas, and that was incredible, a thought so dizzying he thought his head might lift right off his shoulders. All that was left was to get to the gate, not die, get home, the gate, don’t die, get _home_ —

He hit the edge. Not the one over which he’d seen his temporary salvation in the form of another one of God’s horrifying experiments with gene splicing, but the other one, where the ledge folded back into the mountainside; the direction where that formless fucker had inclined its head-shape when it had mentioned Cas’s flowers. Dean, after all, had made quite the name for himself by running toward the things that itched _not quite right_ at him. 

Here, the drop was steeper: twelve feet, fifteen. He braced himself, but it didn’t help very much.

His knees bent to absorb the impact, but pain lanced through the ankle that had taken the worst of his bout of the unfun kind of mud wrestling earlier. He staggered, steadied himself by slamming a shoulder against the rock wall; ugh, more bruises. In his chest, Cas throbbed in time with his ankle. He was a tangible kernel of feeling—concern, belief, a vast, bottomless sense of peace which was probably what AA-goers all over were chasing with every chant of _God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change._ And Dean gratefully, greedily drew strength from it, enough to propel himself long, lurching steps forward.

This, Dean thought as he grimly staggered on, was the thing about flowers:

He’d been dying for a drink for the last half a day at _least_ because the thing about Angel Hell, the thing about this perfect, unsullied simulacrum of a world without humans, was that there was no fucking water _._

Sure, past the line of peaks and ridges that Dean had spent most of that day swearing at, the sea churned stormy and wrathful against the rocky beach. But that water seemed to be unnaturally— _divinely_ —self-contained: no rivers or streams emptying into it, no saltwater ponds that flooded over when the tide came in. Just the sea, and running along it mountains hewn not from earth or dirt but solid, jagged stone. Even the few trees and scrub that eked out a hold in the cracks and fissures reminded Dean of Arizona creosote, roots longer than Dean’s whole body reaching for water buried under feet of dry rock.

Killer mud made sense. The poisonous rose light of the Cage made sense. Cas’s soul made tangible—even that made sense.

But flowers didn’t.

And in this world, if something didn’t make sense, it usually meant that a long time ago a pagan goddess had walked on this strip of hallowed ground, her very presence an irreconcilable paradox, a thing foreign to the substance of Hell. It usually meant a Gate.

Dean limped around an obnoxiously placed crag at the base of the mountain. Tucked beneath a vault of rock, a thin ribbon of flatness snaked between the heights of neighboring mountains; the gully was dark from where the towering canyon walls blotted out the sky’s pink glare and dry enough that a network of thin cracks splintered through the ground, the rock pulled too taut from lack of water to be able to bear its own weight. But further in, the cracks changed color, black giving way to faint strains of color.

Purple and yellow. In his chest, Cas gave a quiet whisper of delight.

From between the cracks flowers peeked out, tiny, the size of his thumbnail, the kind of shockingly delicate thing the girls he’d known as a kid had woven into flower chains. Sparse at first, but they grew thicker farther back until they looked like some strange violet scrub bush clinging stubbornly to the rock face. They looked like a trail to follow, like breadcrumbs to lead them straight to the unnatural source of that out-of-place water in riotous purple flecked with gold. Impossible colors for impossible flowers.

“Cas,” Dean told the hurt in his chest, “we’re getting out of here alive.”

_alive_

“Exactly,” he said, and dragged himself down the narrow winding path that the grace of a capricious goddess and Cas’s fondness for passing pretty things had carved out for him.

– ✞ –

He wasn’t sure how far he’d made it when he heard it. Not far enough.

The sound blasted through the air and scraped up his spine, a bloody metallic roar that he didn’t hear so much as feel as a cold spike of fear into his hypothalamus. Triumph in that scream, and hunger, and he recognized both; the dance was over, he and Cas were pumpkins again—juicy, pulpy, just waiting to be smashed—

When the angel’s voice came it was faint but clear, like a stern demonstration of distance being no excuse for a lack of mental rigor. _Oh, go on. Do give me a good chase._

Dean’s heart skipped a beat—or was that Cas-in-his-heart, a frisson of fear passing from him and into Dean—and this was it. They were out of time.

Between one step and the next he was flat-out sprinting, his sprained ankle shrieking uncooperatively all the while. He ground flowers into rock with every uneven step as he tried to outpace the silent laughter floating down to him. It came from somewhere high and further back but was gaining every moment, and Dean, he raced over more cracks, more flowers, but where was the _Gate_ —

Would the bastard wait until he was dead and no more fun to rip Cas from the safety of his ribcage, or would he start there—

Scared. He was scared, something else that he hadn’t bothered with as a demon and which came to him now only haltingly, in pieces. He felt the air part around his body and it felt to him like breaths tickling the back of his neck, like someone breathing onto his skin _right_ behind him. But angels didn’t breathe—

But Cas was breathing, or at least—Dean could feel him moving in time with each of his breaths, a pressure in his chest that deepened with every ragged gasp of air, relaxed with every grunt-exhale of pain he couldn’t quite beat down all the way. Cas’s soul was just a low hum of concern at the edge of his consciousness. Dean thought that maybe he didn’t want to distract him, was keeping himself scrupulously silent except for the worry he couldn’t pull back, that familiar worry that came out whenever Dean did something stupid like enter an unbreakable contract with Cain or try to run on a sprained ankle, that worry that Dean was almost more familiar with than he was with his own face because as it turned out he did stupid things quite a lot. God, he had to keep him safe. He had to _protect_ him—Cas’s soul, that precious fragile _human_ thing, that lovely gold-blue light that shouldn’t be down here, should never have gotten dragged down to the muck and the heat where things like Dean and the monster chasing them belonged at all—he had to keep him _safe_ —

 _Yes, run._ God, that screech-growl of tearing metal and rust. So much louder now, so much closer. The Gate, where was the Gate— _You won’t make it, but I do love a little exercise before a meal._

If, at that moment, Crowley had descended from on high and offered to swap Dean’s soul for the chance to punch out that son of a bitch just once, he was pretty sure he’d take it. But—and despair cracked through him like a stab of pain from his bad ankle—he’d sent Crowley away, and the bastard was right. He couldn’t outrun an angel. He couldn’t outrun this angel. He couldn’t save Cas.

Between his heart and a lung, Cas stirred.

Just a faint flutter in his heartbeat; Dean thought hazily that it felt like a butterfly trapped in his ribcage—no, something stronger—a bird— _be brave_ , the Cas-thing hummed, and, like alchemy in the blood, Dean felt braver.

His boots were finding puddles now, kicking up plumes of dusty water with no source in sight. Over the spray, over the hurt animal noises that every step ripped out of his throat and the not-sound of terrible laughter, getting stronger, louder, all the time, his thoughts fell into place with the kind of stunning clarity only Cas was capable of bringing out in him.

He thought: there’d been another angel, and he’d outrun it. A monster of muck and statuary, low and sucking where his pursuer now was all teeth and razor-talons, but it had caught him, it would’ve killed him, and he’d gotten away. He’d cried out, and it had stopped. He’d cried out.

He thought: the angel, _this_ angel, it had frozen his voice—

He thought: it had told him a story, or the start of a story, or at least the end of it, about the harpist who’d walked out of Hell, and now Dean thought: he knew that one. The strings player who’d walked into Hell for his sweetheart, who’d made it past all the dangers except his own temptations, who’d faltered and lost her on the long climb up. Ann Marie had told it to him.

He’d tamed the beasts, she’d said; the beasts of other stories, the angel had called itself—the angel with its three ravenous coyote-mouths which from time to time slipped through cracks into other stories—

He thought: for these last hours, days, every creature he’d encountered had been the true form of an angel, wavelengths of intent turned visible, tangible. And—and was that what was so incomprehensible, unknowable about them, that to see and understand how a consciousness and a sun’s worth of power packed itself into a _wavelength_ was to die?

Beats in a marching rhythm, notes on a page. Or fragments of music in the Heavenly choir. Inside him, Cas hummed and sang like a song he’d never heard but knew the words to all the same.

He was splashing through inch-deep water now, uprooting delicate clusters of purple and gold petals and sending them flying with every heavy step. Under a tall pillar of rock leaning crookedly against the wall of the gorge, around a crumbling wall of boulders that narrowed the path to a space just wider than his shoulders, and, in such quick succession that the bastard must have timed it for maximum effect, he saw them.

Ahead, a archway cut into the side of the cliff face, just a simple curve of stone only noticeable because it was built from a paler, smoother kind of rock than the mountain above it. Behind, a black shadow cutting down from the heights above, so fast and dark and full of coiled hunger that to Dean it looked like a snarl made visible. The Gate just a moment away, and the angel so fast they’d never make it.

But an idea was coming to him now, hasty, undignified, _insane—he could tame all the beasts and birds._

So he ran for it, ran for that limestone arch where under the blocked-off opening water was trickling out from some pure, sweet reservoir on the other side, a pagan goddess’s river leaking into Angel Hell. And as he ran he kept careful track of the foreign pressure in his head that was the angel’s triumph and of the sound of his own agonized breaths. He ran, and ran, the shadow gone from a hundred feet behind him to fifty in a step, ran until the angel was so close and the buzzing between his ears so strong that he thought he could taste its sadistic pleasure in his back molars, no words, just a pure concentrated punch of _it could have never ended any other way_ , he ran until the angel almost had them both, in its arrogance and its rage and its hunger _almost_ had them both.

He could still hear the grunts of pain every impact between his bad foot and stone forced from his throat.

And, hoping like hell he was right because if he wasn’t this would be the stupidest way he’d died yet, he filled his lungs and more screamed than sang, “ _FOR NOW I SMELL THE RAIN, AND WITH IT PAIN, AND IT’S HEADED MY WAY—”_

To the unharmonious tune of the most desperate rendition Dean had ever given of “Ramble On,” the angel lurched—

—froze—

—flickered—

— _wavered_ , like a bad signal on the TV, like a disrupted transmission—

—or like a sound wave meeting another in destructive interference—

_“SOMETIMES I GROW SO TIRED, BUT I KNOW I’VE GOT ONE THING I GOTTA DO—”_

And there, in the pinprick spaces between each word, in the half-second pauses where he gulped in more air to belt out another line, he could feel the angel’s _savage_ wrath, astonishment bleeding into fury bleeding into foaming madness, and that, more than anything, told Dean that he’d got it right. He’d got it right.

 _“RAMBLE ON!”_ he bellowed. _“AND NOW’S THE TIME, THE TIME IS NOW, TO SING MY SONG—”_

The angel was still moving in jerky, lurching motions between phrases, nothing he could do about that as a mere human, but he was putting distance between them now, and—bonus—it turned out sound shook through what passed for an angel’s voice just as well as its physical form. At last, a way to shut it up, the blessed psychic absence of anyone in Dean’s head but himself (and Cas) as long as he was buying their way out for a song, his song.

And the Gate was close, just ahead where the gully turned into mountain, the water was soaking into his jeans. He was singing, still singing, if you could call it that—as a demon he’d never bothered to take someone booing him off the karaoke stage as a provocation because he was fully aware that they were in the right— _got no time for spreading roots, the time has come to be gone_ —

And it slowed him, too, how much of his air he gave up to Led Zeppelin at the top of his lungs, it wasn’t just his ankle shrieking in pain anymore but every oxygen-starved muscle, but in the heartbeat between _gotta find the queen_ and _of all my dreams_ he tasted panic from the angel and knew he was close, he was close. He could _taste_ it, the taste of springwater from somewhere high and cold, something sweet and nurturing, so essentially _other_ from Gehenna’s indifferent starkness.

“ _’TWAS IN THE DARKEST DEPTHS OF MORDOR, I MET A GIRL SO FAIR—”_ and the flickering scream behind him like his voice was a finger on the bastard angel’s mental record player and the flowers flashing by in violent color and the faint pulse of Cas like a second heart in his chest—

He struck the Gate hard enough to knock all the breath from him. His fist into the stone, solid stone.

He’d seen it, from as far back as his first sight of the Gate he’d seen it, the way the arch framed a pale wall of the same kind of stone where there should’ve been air, light, a _door_ to somewhere, but he’d thought—what had he thought?—that once he got there it would give way under the same spell that kept the air musty and thick on his tongue and the sky sunless, that it would rise for him like a drawbridge, that it would be _something other than this_ , a bricked-over arch and the only way through a space at the bottom the width of a finger, a crack large enough for water but not a body, not even a soul. His knuckles against the stone slab before him again, hard, pitiless. Their way out, closed to them. The last Gate sealed shut.

He lost precious seconds to breathless despair. Behind him, the angel made a not-noise of savage triumph and lunged. _Finally, the end of the line_ , he thought and couldn’t tell whether it was the angel’s voice or his own sounding in his head.

 _try_ , Cas thought fiercely.

Not just his life, but Cas’s too. His presence sent determination spiking through Dean like a lightning strike and he wound up for another verse, freezing the angel’s ropy, cabled paw just a breath from his face. Another pause for breath and it’d have them, but he had this moment, this moment, to figure it out, to figure something out—

The last gates had demanded something from him—a concession, an answer, a sacrifice. What did the Gate want from him? A blood sacrifice?—his knuckles were dripping onto the stone, in his experience that usually worked—another kind of sacrifice?—his dignity?—a password?

 _sing_ , Cas reminded him.

 _You don’t seem like a harpist to me,_ the angel had said. 

He put his mouth to the stone and in a voice cracking under the strain of holding off a homicidal angel, sang the melody that had been following him through Hell, the one he’d first heard on a scratchy radio in a town full of people he could not save, the one he’d last heard in a dream he hadn’t wanted to leave.

“ _Pour out pure waters, pour out fine oil,”_ he warbled, “ _The love of my ages is dead—”_

 _NO,_ screeched the angel from behind him.

But he didn’t need that sign to know that it had worked. As he sang Inanna’s lament, the solid wall in front of him slowly ground upward, like a drawbridge lowering, like a door opening, like a goddamned miracle. Ahead of him was mist, pure white mist, and water, spilling out to soak his knees, his thighs. The stone under his palm drew up and he stumbled forward, over the threshold.

Pain, blazing pain, exploded in him radiating out from where Cas was tucked inside him. He recognized the pain of trying to make his way across the border of two worlds when part of him was stuck behind, the pain of having the demon half of his soul ripped out as he fought his way across another threshold but worse, because now he was fighting it, struggling to keep Cas caught in his chest, where he belonged. It was like some terrible giant had taken hold of his heart and was yanking him backwards, and each step made the hole in his chest grow bloodier. He fought the tearing agony like a buoy caught on a current. He screamed.

By his heart, Cas screamed as well and he wanted to shield him, wanted to wrap himself around him and soak up all the pain—it was just pain, he could take pain—but he was already wrapped around him in all the ways that mattered and still he was suffering. _dean let me go,_ Cas thought at him, wretched, exhausted.

“I let you go once,” Dean said through gritted teeth. Rings of holy fire and Purgatory and taking up the Blade. “I’m not doing that again.” Emboldened, he clung on tighter and shoved forward harder. He could feel on his neck the hot breath of his approaching death, but he would not, could not. Would never let Cas go. 

And with a final rippling scream he pried himself forward and landed on his knees in clear, pure water.

Behind him, the screaming of the angel winked out. Dean turned and couldn’t see it scratching at the door it could not pass, at last a crack in the story it couldn’t squeeze through. All he saw was smooth blunt stone and a Gate locked from the inside.

 _dean,_ Cas thought happily, gratefully.

“No need to sound so surprised,” he grumbled through a throat still raw from singing for his life.

– ✞ –

He—they—waded deeper into water so clear the mist was doubled like a mirror. He was too stunned from their haphazard tumble down the rocks and their precarious escape to think much about the fact that the seventh Gate was meant to be the way out, and yet the air still rested wet and thick on his tongue and the sky was uniformly pale and unpromising. He stumbled forward into water that lapped against his waist, and then at his chest, where Cas kept up a heady drumbeat of _dean dean dean_. He looked around for shore, but everywhere was water and fog. 

Wait. Not quite everywhere.

He squinted through the fog and splashed closer. Slowly a bare rocky crag rose out of the water, barely large enough for the woman-looking thing robed in white and standing on it. Behind her was another spur of rock, maybe just big enough for one person. From it rose a staircase, hewn from the same volcanic-looking stone but spiraling up, up, until the fog and clouds eclipsed it again.

Dean looked at it and thought, _Home._

 _home,_ Cas fluttered inside of him.

The last Gate’s guardian was stationed on the far side of the doors, there not to keep intrepid travelers from entering, but from exiting. Because—and Dean could sense it the way he might feel a cool September breeze wafting in from that direction—beyond the seventh Gate was the way back to Earth.

Exhausted, not sure whether he had anything left to give this one, he swam out to the woman waiting for him on what he was beginning to suspect was the only piece of solid footing in this dimension.

When he got to the rock, he was surprised when she offered a surprisingly strong hand to heave him up onto the rocks from the water which lapped at him impatiently like he was the first thing to disturb it in years. “Are you the nice Ghost of Christmas?” he quipped, because his mouth seemed to run on a different circuit than his common sense.

“I am the boatman,” she said smoothly. She didn’t look like the other two guardians, which was a welcome change—instead her dark features seemed to shift and blur, until Dean, who had a memory for faces only rivaled by hitmen and other professional murderers, couldn’t even begin to describe her. “You’ve journeyed far, Dean Winchester.”

“Yeah. I was there. Hey, be a doll, point me towards the Angel Hell complaints department? I’ve got a jawbone to pick with them.”

 _dean,_ Cas scolded fondly.

“Do you,” she said. She looked pointedly at where, after everything, he still clung to the First Blade. In spite of himself, his grip tightened on the hilt, but the heady buzz of murder didn’t come. _She knows,_ Dean thought about his weakness and his humanity and the slowly-diminishing power of the Blade the deeper he crawled into Hell. Well. Not like he’d have been able to slash his way to the surface anyway.

“I’ve jumped through your hoops,” he said, resigned. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. Given up—” he thought of wisps of smoke trapped behind another Gate— “everything I have. Just let us through, man.”

“You’ve stepped in the wake of someone else’s song,” she corrected. Her words seemed to ring, a song in and of themselves. Mist curled around them. Dean shivered, suddenly aware that he was soaking wet, semi-seriously injured, and cold. _Someone else’s song._ A pagan goddess and an old story told over empty glasses in a bar. 

“How does it go?” Dean asked at last, a simmering suspicion in his gut that he should’ve been asking all along.

“Her lover died. The Queen of Heaven journeyed down to her sister, Ereshkigal, Death. But the doors were bolted against her. To pass the first gate, she had to remove her crown. To pass the second gate, she had to remove her earrings. The third gate, her necklace. The fourth gate, the ornaments of her breast. The fifth gate, her girdle. The sixth, the bangles she wore round her wrists and ankles. At the seventh gate, she removed her wrap, and so stood in front of her sister naked and powerless, the great goddess stripped of all she valued in the world. All who descend must pay a price. God gave up her immortality for the life of the one she loved.

“Ereshkigal slew her where she stood. Above on earth, the fields turned fallow. The herds became wasted and barren. The sun darkened. Such are the consequences of the death of God.

“The servant spirits, the _kur-jara_ and the _gala-tura_ , followed her below. One held the life-giving plant, and one the life-giving water. And they passed through each gate until they came to the throne of Ereshkigal, and they pleaded for the corpse that lay at her feet. They soothed her pains and begged the body of their mistress and Ereshkigal assented. God rose and at the seventh gate donned her wrap. At the sixth, her bracelets. At the fifth, her girdle. At the fourth, her brooch. At the third, her necklace. At the second, her earrings. At the first, her crown. And she emerged in splendor into the day, and the sun returned to its place in the sky, and the fields flourished, and the herds calved. Her servants lingered to guard the gates for the rest of time. But the road she walked stayed open. 

“Before Orpheus and Eurydice, before Osiris and the ankh. This was the first story. The first resurrection. Thieves arrive now and then to steal away a few more precious mortal years. But all who descend must pay with that which is valued most. One’s own life, or love, or a musical gift. Some descend. Some return. Few are strong enough to pay the price.”

 _the price,_ Cas whispered to him.

“And what’s the price I have to pay?” Dean asked, throat dry, sure that he already knew the answer.

“You have been paying it. You have offered up your indifference. The truth of why you quest. The act of saving others. The act of killing. Control over your quest. Your most precious desire. You only have one thing left to give.”

What he valued most. Inanna, her immortality. The spirits, their freedom. And Dean, who had walked into the darkness a demon and had let Hell pry away the solace he found in death crust by crust until without even realizing it, he’d lost it. He looked at the First Blade and felt an ache. Not the supernatural addiction the Mark pumped through him, but a terribly human weakness all his own. A longing for the power, for the release, for the untainted _freedom_ from himself that it turned out he’d been craving all his life. For the glorious moments in which nothing mattered but the blade.

_it matters_

The sweet release of death—his or someone else’s. The freedom. The _peace_. He had let Hell strip away everything he was, every last thing he still valued as a demon. Except this.

The currency of Irkalla—of Ereshkigal—is sentiment, not gold. That’s not how you pay the boatman.

“ _Play for me on the flute of lapis, that the dead may rise up and breathe the sweet smoke of the living,_ ” the Boatman sang. Dean recognized the cadence, though he’d never heard the words before. Inanna’s lament.

Dean drew the Blade and swallowed a last look. And he held it out, hilt-first, to the Boatman.

She took the blade slowly, delicately. Dean swallowed back the ache behind his teeth, the urge to reach out and take it back, because buried between his breastbone and his heart was Cas’s warm presence, and this close to him, skin to soul, he knew—knew like he knew very little else in his life, knew like he knew he had to protect Sam and hunting was in his blood—that Cas was worth this sacrifice. Cas was worth salvation. She held the Blade in her palms and it looked discordantly ugly against her smooth brown skin, a wound in this place of mirror-pure water and fallen sky.

Well, he supposed that if he couldn’t wield it, this was as safe a place for it as any. Better than the Mariana Trench, even, the last tier of a dimension of Hell only accessible by an obscure ritual that had all but turned to dust. He glanced at the mark, still red and livid on his arm. But it looked duller now, somehow, restrained.

“It will fade,” the Boatman said, watching him with something almost warm on her multiplicitous face. “The curse is strong, but gifting is stronger. Even goddesses must pay the toll.”

He blinked and she was gone. He was standing alone on the first stair of the winding staircase he’d spied before, alone in a world of white, freezing mist and still water below. One last melodrama to cap off the whole experience, Dean thought sourly. He began to climb. He didn’t look back.

– ✞ –

He climbed the staircase for what might have been infinity, one step blending into the next, an endless expanse of stairway above and below. He felt mired in the in-between space between Hell and life. Around what might have been the eighth floor, he began to get winded. Around the fortieth floor, counting floor equivalents became too depressing, so he concentrated firmly on hauling himself up to the next step, and the next, and the next, cursing Hell and God and Inanna and everyone else who might’ve confused physical suffering for nirvana.

As he climbed, this is what he thought about:

Memories of Hell were sharper in Hell. No longer driven onward by the mad scramble to find Cas, no longer insulated by demonic indifference, the stifling air and thick shadows cast by the fog brought the worst moments swimming to the surface. He remembered. Heat searing up the soles of his feet until he could smell the odor of his own flesh cooking. Alistair’s avaricious grin when they’d been introduced, _Hello, Dean, you’ve caused quite a stir, I’ll be your torturer from now on._ Screaming until his throat was raw and no sound came out and he struggled to even breathe with how fiercely he was trying to howl in pain, to dilute some of the suffering by expressing it. He remembered.

And picking up the knife. Not just torturing, but being good at it. _Learning_ from Alistair. The best techniques for flaying, for filleting, for tearing at ligaments and tendons until the victim might as well have been a sack of loose meat, like the Devil’s own cooking class. Taking pride in it. Feeling his soul start to rot and curl at the edges. He remembered that, too.

Most incredible of all, incredible because he had never known it before, he remembered being saved.

He remembered a light so pure and brilliant and different from the dim Hell-lights which illuminated the rack so that the victim could see what you were doing and no further; he remembered screaming at the way it had burned what passed for skin in Hell, recoiling, a terror like none he had ever known clawing its way up his throat at the pain and the beauty and the fearsomeness of that light. _Be not afraid._ He remembered thrashing in the grasp of a power he couldn’t begin to comprehend, screaming at the light to take someone else, he didn’t deserve it, he didn’t even want it, save someone else. He remembered the dizzying ascent, Cas carrying his soul within his grace just as Dean was carrying Cas inside of him now.

 _grip you tight,_ Cas whispered.

He wasn’t Orpheus, but he didn’t look down to see where Cas pulsed inside of him like a second heartbeat. He wondered if Ann Marie—Eurydice—had been right, if the only way out of Hell was to give up something of yourself. He wondered what Cas gave up when he took this path, and resolved to ask him when they were back home.

Home. Without him noticing the air had grown thinner. He didn’t look down—the fog would’ve obscured his vision anyway, but he didn’t need the reminder that he’d climbed higher than most buildings—he’d have to climb the stairs of the Empire State Building one day to compare. And light, above, gleaming down so brightly it burned away the fog. He slid one hand over his heart and felt it beat in time with the foreign presence inside him. _Ready?_ he thought-asked at Cas.

_ready_

Together they climbed back up to the shining world until they could once more see the stars.

– ✞ –

When he opened his eyes, he was in the bunker. Again.

He sat up, startled. Hunched over in a chair in the corner of his room like a mopey gargoyle, Sam stared at him with red-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks. Dean first felt for Cas between his ribs—nothing, panic surged in him—and then at his back where the Dick Angel had clawed at him. Nothing; unbroken T-shirt and smooth skin with only the scars that should already be there. The Cas realization was briefly put on hold when he realized—

“I was dead all this time?!” he shouted. All that—the brutal pounding he’d taken at the hands of the Things, his desperate run for the seventh Gate—and that hadn’t even been his own physical body? Dean was a big believer that if you were astral projecting, things shouldn’t _hurt_.

“Crowley brought you here,” Sam said warily. Dean assessed him, felt the familiar worry surge up in him at Sam’s sorry state. He hadn’t cut his hair in an even longer time than usual. That was his sadness style.

“Why would you help me?” he asked. As far as Sam knew, he was still a demon. Why would he even bring him into the bunker if it wasn’t to strap him down and cure him?

“Because you were going to save Cas,” Sam snapped.

Sometimes Dean forgot how much Cas meant to Sam, too. “Well—thanks for not throwing me in the dungeon immediately. That would suck to wake up to.”

Sam squinted at him, his angry-puzzled squint. Still furious with him over the last time they saw each other—which, yeah, ouch, Dean winced remembering—but chewing over a mystery in his brain as well. “Why are you acting so…”

“I think,” Dean said, “I’m human.”

Sam’s breath caught. He visibly struggled for words for a minute— _how? is it true?_ how?, Dean could hear the wheels of his brain squeaking even without words, damn, he’d missed this, the one person he could read unconditionally and who knew him equally down to his bones—before he settled on, “Then get out of bed.”

Get out of—

Dean glanced up. Sam had spray-painted a devil’s trap over his bed.

“That better come out,” he groused, and heaved himself off of the bed and out of the trap’s radius.

Sam was watching him with huge wet eyes. “Dean… are you really—?”

Unable to take the puppy-eyes for any longer, Dean strode over and pulled him into a hug. Sam fairly collapsed into his arms. Dean huffed and tried to angle himself so that the wall would support both their weights. “Dean,” Sam said, not quite blubbering but close. “I thought—how?—The Mark—are you—?”

“Long, stupid story later,” Dean said. “I need to check on Cas.”

To make room for Dean’s carcass, Cas had been moved to Sam’s room. Dean resolved to give Sam a talk about giving up all the made-up beds in the bunker to literal corpses who wouldn’t be able to feel whether they were lying on chiffon or the library table.

But Dean wasn’t a corpse anymore. And neither was Cas.

He was still unconscious—probably still recovering from the grace-sickness that had been the end of him—but he was breathing. Dean let out a shaky breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding since he’d discovered that Cas was no longer tucked inside of him. He missed the feeling—he may have felt like a bubble about to pop, but it was worth having Cas so close, feeling the press of his soul against his own. Without thinking, he took his hand.

Sam hovered in the doorway. “Is he—”

“He’s back,” Dean said, an unexpected crack in his voice. “I did it. I got us both back.”

“Dean—” evidently Sam’s pent-up questions had surged past the emotions he was feeling— ”what _happened_? Crowley just said something about a Sumerian ritual and you trying to get Cas back—and what happened to the Blade, it just disappeared a few hours before you woke up—and—”

“I promise,” Dean said, “I will answer all of your annoying Sammy questions. But first, I am going to wait for Cas to wake up so I can say to him, ‘I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,’” he recited in his best approximation of Cas’s gravel-and-whiskey. “And then he and I are going to go for a drive.”

– ✞ – ✞ – ✞ –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come [tumble with me](http://midrashic.tumblr.com). If you like my work, buy me a coffee.


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